We perform principal components analyses of the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment and TV sentiment in order to gain information on their structure and information content. By introducing the new sentiment variable TV sentiment, gathered from sentiment from statements from over...

We examine the information content of a newly created news sentiment index from over 300,000 articles from some of the most widely read newspapers in the US to explain changes in the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1995 to 2009. Using ARMA-models, we show that consumer...

With a novel data set, we test whether sentiment in TV news can be used as a proxy for consumer sentiment in order to explain changes in private consumption growth in the United States. The University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) is taken to compare its explanatory power with TV...

The notion of choice inconsistency is widely spread in the literature on behavioral economics. Several approaches were used to account for the observation that people reverse their choices over time. This paper aims to explain the formation of resolutions regarded as internal self-binding...

We examine the statistical power of fundamental and behavioral factors with regards to stock returns of the Dow Jones Industrials Index. With a novel sentiment dataset from over 3.6 million Reuters news articles, we find signifcant correlations between Reuters senti- ment and stock returns. We...

This paper presents a historical account of legislated tax changes in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1964 to 2010, thus establishing a database appropriate for the macroeconometric analysis of the fiscal policy transmission mechanism. Ninety-five quantitatively important pieces of tax...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés' reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. We find that protégé punish a paternalist restricting their freedom of choice. Yet, this negative reaction is not based on principled...

In this paper, I estimate a structural panel vector autoregression to study the consequences of changes in U.S. state government fiscal policies for local economic activity in the short-term. My main result is that the state-level spending multiplier is relatively small and the tax multiplier...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés’ reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. Thus, our research is concerned with the perception of paternalism by those who are directly affected by it, rather than with the...

We study the influence of taxation on labour supply using a specifically designed representative survey of the German population. First, we investigate whether taxes generally matter for the labour supply decisions of our respondents. Around 41 per cent report taking taxes into consideration,...