Thursday, 17 March 2011: 10:00
In this paper we aim at exploring the impact of stock and bond markets returns and volatility on the consumer confidence and economic sentiment indices.
Our dataset covers the major European economies, Japan and the US for the 1990-2010 period. Conditional on data availability, the role of real estate markets will be explored.
Our preliminary results suggest that there is considerable heterogeneity among countries, possibly reflecting differences in investment behavior, cultural characteristics and/or the
financial system structure. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of our findings in the light of the ongoing global financial crisis and the debate on the need for a new financial
architecture.