Three major themes have emerged in the literature on patterns. These involve pattern recognition, pattern matching (do a set of observations match a particular pattern?) and pattern formation ( how does a pattern emerge?). The talk takes up each of these themes, presenting some economic examples of where a pattern has been of interest, how it has been measured (section 2), some issues in checking whether a given pattern holds (section 3), what theories might account for a particular pattern (section 4), and the predictability of patterns ( section5). Most attention is paid to judging macroeconomic models based on their ability to generate macroeconomic and financial patterns, and some simple tests are suggested to do this. Because sentiment and the origins of patterns are so inextricably linked in macroeconomics and .finance we will spend some time looking at the literature which deals with the interaction of series representing sentiment with those representing macroeconomic and financial outcomes.
