Expenditure, Confidence, and Uncertainty: Identifying Shocks to Consumer Confidence Using Daily Data

The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this question by using high-frequency microdata on spending and consumer confidence, and I find that consumer confidence contains information relevant to predicting spending, independent from other indicators. The exogenous movements in consumer confidence lead to very short fluctuations in consumer spending, consistent with the hypothesis that more consumer confidence reflects less uncertainty about the future

CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

Resonant radiation from collapsing light pulses and spatiotemporal light bullets

Resonant excitation of dispersive waves from spatiotemporal light bullets exhibits unique features such as rogue statistics. Resonant radiation may also be stimulated on a co-propagating THz pulse, bridging a 6 octave spectral gap

Spatiotemporal light bullets in bulk media

Three-dimensional light bullets in bulk media are identified, through their specific energy density flux, as polychromatic Bessel-like pulses. We also study resonant radiation emission with applications in rogue event studies and THz detection

The Impact of the Business Cycle on Service Providers

For service providers, it is essential to understand how their business is affected by the macroeconomy. This is especially pressing for the tourism sector, the world’s largest export service, because the number of incoming visitors is likely to be strongly determined by the business cycles in the countries of origin. Utilizing state-of-the-art business-cycle metrics, we derive novel insights on the relationship between international tourism and the business cycle. We find an excess sensitivity of the sector to economic cycles based on a multidecade data set of international visitors to New Zealand coming from multiple counties and with various visitor purposes. However, we find no asymmetries in the speed of adjustment across contractions and expansions, suggesting a quicker recovery than many other (nonservice) sectors. Moreover, a higher cyclical volatility results in higher growth in the long run. A robustness check for two more destination countries (Australia and Japan) yields comparable insights. The results underscore the need to closely monitor the cyclical sensitivity and long-term growth prospects of the various visitor streams into the country, in order to (i) better tailor the accommodations and services to these streams and (ii) exploit diversification opportunities to reduce the overall cyclical volatility