Bharath and Shumway (2008) provide evidence that shows that it is the functional form of Merton’s (1974) distance to default (DD) model that makes it useful and important for predicting defaults. In this paper, we investigate whether the default predictability of the Merton DD model would be...

Bharath and Shumway (2008) provide evidence that shows that it is the functional form of Merton’s (1974) distance to default (DD) model that makes it useful and important for predicting defaults. In this paper, we investigate whether the default predictability of the Merton DD model would be...

This study examines the relation between the sentiment of noise traders and stock prices in ten Post-Communist East European stock markets: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic and Slovenia over the period April 2004 to March 2014. The...

This paper investigates the relationship among consumer credits, interest rates, consumer confidence and consumption expenditures in Turkey by using the Toda-Yamamoto (1992) Granger-causality approach and regression analysis over the period 2005:1-2012:8. The empirical results based on the...

Aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between two investor sentiment proxies, namely closed end fund discount and consumer confidence index. Monthly closed end fund discount and consumer confidence index data have been derived for the time period between 2005 and 2012. The...

Das Papier untersucht die Rolle von wirtschaftlichen Stimmungen bei der Transformation der mittel- und osteuropäischen Länder, z.B. im Hinblick auf die Finanzmärkte, sowie den Zusammenhang zwischen globalen wirtschaftlichen Stimmungen, Einkommen und Aktienkursen. Das zentrale Ergebnis:...

Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper...

In this study we introduce a new monthly indicator for private consumption in Germany based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on unobserved factors extracted from a set of consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights...

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments, e.g. consumer moods, for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEEC's financial markets. Since the...

In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on factors extracted from consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights for Search. The forecasting performance...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

This paper estimates a simple univariate model of expectation or opinion formation in continuous time adapting a 'canonical' stochastic model of collective opinion dynamics (Weidlich and Haag, 1983; Lux, 1995, 2007). This framework is applied to a selected data set on survey-based expectations from...

We examine whether consumer confidence - as a proxy for individual investor sentiment - affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recent evidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock market returns on average...