Economic sentiment surveys are carried out by all European Union member states on a monthly basis. The survey outcomes are used to obtain early insight into future economic evolutions and often receive extensive press coverage. Based on these surveys, the European Commission constructs an...

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...