Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/98593 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 13-197
Publisher: 
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, MI
Abstract: 
The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this question by using high-frequency microdata on spending and consumer confidence, and I find that consumer confidence contains information relevant to predicting spending, independent from other indicators. The exogenous movements in consumer confidence lead to very short fluctuations in consumer spending, consistent with the hypothesis that more consumer confidence reflects less uncertainty about the future.
Subjects: 
Expenditure
consumer confidence
vector autoregression
JEL: 
E21
E32
C32
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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