The aim of this paper is to make a comparison between survey and time series-based estimates of capacity utilization for the Italian manufacturing sector. The comparison is focused on the actual economic crisis. Two kinds of empirical evaluation are implemented: the ability of the series to...

We present a common-source infection model for explaining the formation of expectations by households. Starting from the framework of "Macroeconomic expectations of household and professional forecasters", we augment the original model assuming that also uninformed individuals are able to update...