This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments, e.g. consumer moods, for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEECs' fi nancial markets. Since the...

Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper...

This paper estimates a simple univariate model of expectation or opinion formation in continuous time adapting a 'canonical' stochastic model of collective opinion dynamics (Weidlich and Haag, 1983; Lux, 1995, 2007). This framework is applied to a selected data set on survey-based expectations from...

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments, e.g. consumer moods, for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEEC's financial markets. Since the...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on factors extracted from consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights for Search. The forecasting performance...

It is sometimes argued that news reports in the media suffer from biased reporting. Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias, called ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias,...

Could a researcher or policy analyst use data reported from surveys of consumer confidence to improve forecasts of consumer spending? This issue has been examined in the literature previously, which reached the conclusion that consumer confidence helped improve the forecasts slightly. But that...

Die zunehmende Intensität des Preiswettbewerbs, die steigende Zahl der Geschäftsaufgaben und Marktaustritte vor allem kleinerer Unternehmen des Einzelhandels sowie die gegenwärtige Krise der KarstadtQuelle-Gruppe sind Anlass vielfältiger Diskussionen um die Zukunft des Einzelhandels, auch um...

Die zunehmende Intensität des Preiswettbewerbs, die steigende Zahl der Geschäftsaufgaben und Marktaustritte vor allem kleinerer Unternehmen des Einzelhandels sowie die gegenwärtige Krise der KarstadtQuelle-Gruppe sind Anlass vielfältiger Diskussionen um die Zukunft des Einzelhandels, auch um...