Information, Animal Spirits, and the Meaning of Innovations in Consumer Confidence
研究发现消费者信心创新主要反映对未来生产力增长的预期信息，而非动物精神的因果影响，这对理解信心与经济活动的关系有重要意义。
Innovations to consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Does this reflect a causal effect of animal spirits on economic activity, or news about exogenous future productivity received by consumers? Using indirect inference, we study the impulse responses to confidence innovations in conjunction with an appropriately augmented New Keynesian model. While news, animal spirits, and pure noise all contribute to confidence innovations, the relationship between confidence and subsequent activity is almost entirely reflective of the news component. Confidence innovations are well characterized as noisy measures of changes in expected productivity growth over a relatively long horizon.