It is often believed that the consumer sentiment index has predictive power for future consumption levels. While Granger causality tests have already been used to test for this, no attempt has been made yet to quantify the predictive power of the consumer sentiment index over different time...

Valuing customers is a central issue for any commercial activity. The customer lifetime value (CLV) is the discounted value of the future profits that this customer yields to the company. In order to compute the CLV, one needs to predict the future number of transactions a customer will make and...

Opening, lunch and closing of financial markets induce a periodic component in the volatility of high-frequency returns. We show that price jumps cause a large bias in the classical periodicity estimators and propose robust alternatives. We find that accounting for periodicity greatly improves...