IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/amu/wpaper/1608.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Consumption, sentiment, and economic news

Author

Listed:
  • Martha Starr

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of economic news on consumer sentiment, and examines whether ‘news shocks’ –- changes in coverage that would not be expected from incoming data on economic fundamentals -– have aggregate effects. Using monthly U.S. data and a structural vector-autoregression, I find that (1) sentiment is affected by news shocks, (2) after filtering out effects of news shocks, shocks to sentiment still have positive effects on consumer spending, and (3) news shocks influence both spending and unemployment in significant, though transitory ways. These results are consistent with other evidence of a role of non-fundamental factors in aggregate fluctuations.

Suggested Citation

  • Martha Starr, 2008. "Consumption, sentiment, and economic news," Working Papers 2008-16, American University, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:amu:wpaper:1608
    DOI: 10.17606/dpxv-sh50
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.17606/dpxv-sh50
    File Function: First version, 2008
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17606/dpxv-sh50?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gric, Zuzana & Ehrenbergerova, Dominika & Hodula, Martin, 2022. "The power of sentiment: Irrational beliefs of households and consumer loan dynamics," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).
    2. Aneta Maria Kłopocka, 2017. "Does Consumer Confidence Forecast Household Saving and Borrowing Behavior? Evidence for Poland," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 133(2), pages 693-717, September.
    3. Bennani, Hamza, 2020. "Central bank communication in the media and investor sentiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 431-444.
    4. Aneta M. Klopocka & Rumiana Gorska, 2021. "Forecasting Household Saving Rate with Consumer Confidence Indicator and its Components: Panel Data Analysis of 14 European Countries," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(3), pages 874-898.
    5. Ahmed, M. Iqbal & Cassou, Steven P., 2016. "Does consumer confidence affect durable goods spending during bad and good economic times equally?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 86-97.
    6. Deimante Teresiene & Greta Keliuotyte-Staniuleniene & Yiyi Liao & Rasa Kanapickiene & Ruihui Pu & Siyan Hu & Xiao-Guang Yue, 2021. "The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumer and Business Confidence Indicators," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 14(4), pages 1-23, April.
    7. Eleni Zafeiriou & Constantinos Katrakilidis & Chrysanthi Pegiou, 2019. "Consumer Confidence on Heating Oil Prices: An Empirical Study of their Relationship for European Union in a Nonlinear Framework," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(1), pages 63-90.
    8. Hector H. Sandoval & Anita N. Walsh, 2021. "The role of consumer confidence in forecasting consumption, evidence from Florida," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 88(2), pages 757-788, October.
    9. Garz, Marcel, 2018. "Effects of unemployment news on economic perceptions – Evidence from German Federal States," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 172-190.
    10. Lehrer, Steven & Xie, Tian & Zhang, Xinyu, 2021. "Social media sentiment, model uncertainty, and volatility forecasting," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    11. Rambaccussing, Dooruj & Kwiatkowski, Andrzej, 2020. "Forecasting with news sentiment: Evidence with UK newspapers," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1501-1516.
    12. Marie‐Helene Gagnon & Celine Gimet, 2020. "Unconventional economic policies and sentiment: An international assessment," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(6), pages 1544-1591, June.
    13. Eggers, Andrew C. & Ellison, Martin & Lee, Sang Seok, 2021. "The economic impact of recession announcements," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 40-52.
    14. S. Heravi & J. Easaw & R. Golinelli, 2016. "Generalized State-Dependent Models: A Multivariate Approach," Working Papers wp1067, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    15. Buchen, Teresa, 2014. "News Media, Common Information, and Sectoral Comovement," VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy 100391, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    16. Stephen Bruestle & W. Mark Crain, 2015. "A mean-variance approach to forecasting with the consumer confidence index," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(23), pages 2430-2444, May.
    17. Federico Vegetti & Dragoş Adăscăliţei, 2017. "The impact of the economic crisis on latent and early entrepreneurship in Europe," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 13(4), pages 1289-1314, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Consumption; consumer sentiment; economic news; aggregate fluctuations;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:amu:wpaper:1608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Meal (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.