This paper presents evidence on attitude changes among investors in the US stock market. Two basic attitudes are explored: bubble expectations and investor confidence. Semiannual time-series indicators of these attitudes are presented for US stock market institutional investors based on...

Measuring the integration of world capital markets is notoriously difficult. For example, regulatory changes which appear comprehensive may have little impact on the functioning of the capital market if they fail to lead to foreign portfolio inflows. In contrast to the usual practice of...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

A study of business cycles defined as sequences of expansions and contractions in the level of general economic activity does not require trend estimation and elimination, but a study of growth cycles defined as sequences of high and low growth phases does. Major cyclical slowdowns and booms...

In this paper we propose a method to characterize the time series properties of individual consumption, income and interest rates using micro data, as studies in labour economics have characterized the time series properties of hours and earnings. Our approach, however, does not remove aggregate...

An economy in which investors know the true model and its parameters and filter the regime probability from aggregate consumption history has been empirically rejected. Hypothesizing that prices partly reflect investorsʼ belief about the regime, we infer beliefs from prices. The model fits well...

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations,...

This paper proposes that the time-series data on consumption, income, and interest rates are best viewed as generated not by a single representative consumer but by two groups of consumers. Half the consumers are forward-looking and consume their permanent income, but are extremely reluctant to...

Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of...

This paper introduces a class of statistical tests for the hypothesis that some feature of a data set is common to several variables. A feature is detected in a single series by a hypothesis test where the null is that it is absent, and the alternative is that it is present. Examples are serial...