The paper is dealing with the controversial question of the potential impact of stock market fluctuations on consumer confidence. In the last few years, this confidence index has gained importance in business cycle analysis and empirical evidence has shown its explanatory power in forecasting consumption along with standard macroeconomic variables. Meanwhile, numerous interpretations of its fluctuations arose, and few were based on a solid argumentation. Therefore, we propose in this paper to determine which elements are actually driving the confidence index. Using the standard error-correction mechanism model and non-linear methods, we analyze the relationship between the confidence index and several economic variables, over the period ranging from January 1983 to December 2001. As a growing number of economic observers claim the stock market fluctuations have a strong impact on consumer confidence, we especially focus on this potential impact. The models are estimated for the United States and for Belgium for which the importance of equities in the households net wealth is quite different. We find in particular that stock market fluctuations have explanatory power in the evolution of consumer confidence in the United States, especially since the beginning of the nineties.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in its series CORE Discussion Papers with number
2003053.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C11 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Bayesian Analysis C42 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Survey Methods D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: