The Explanatory Power and the Forecast Performance of Consumer Confidence Indices for Private Consumption Growth in Turkey

Hatice Karasoy Can and Çağlar Yüncüler

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 2018, vol. 54, issue 9, 2136-2152

Abstract: In this study, we assess empirically whether consumer confidence indices contain information about future private consumption growth in Turkey. To this end, we estimate models for quarterly total, durable, and nondurable consumption growth with and without sentiment indicators. We evaluate in-sample forecasts and one-step-ahead out-of-sample forecasts from recursive ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates. We also test permanent income and precautionary savings hypotheses with our results. We use overall indices of CNBC-e and Turkstat-CBRT Surveys, and Consumer Expectations Index (CEI) and Propensity to Consume Index (PCI) from the CNBC-e Survey as sentiment measures. We show that the lagged values of consumer sentiment have explanatory power on consumption growth. However, when used in conjunction with other economic variables such as real labor income, real stock price, real interest rate, and exchange rate, only CNBC-e for total consumption, and CBRT and PCI for nondurable consumption provide independent information about future consumption growth. Similarly, the gains in out-of-sample forecasts are observed under the absence of other variables and disappear in almost all cases following their inclusion to the estimations. Finally, we find no clear evidence for either precautionary savings motive or permanent income hypothesis on the link between consumer sentiment and future total consumption changes.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1540496X.2017.1358608 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:emfitr:v:54:y:2018:i:9:p:2136-2152

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MREE20

DOI: 10.1080/1540496X.2017.1358608

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().