Economic sentiment and business cycles: A spillover methodology approach

This paper is one of the latest attempts to observe and explain the relationship between the Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) and GDP growth. This new approach uses the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2009) spillover methodology by combining the feedback relationship and the time-varying (dynamic) aspect of that same relationship. The empirical analysis is based on quarterly data over different periods in the European Union (EU) (as a whole) and in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The main results indicate that the spillovers of shocks between ESI and GDP growth are time-varying for all observed countries, with increasing values of total spillovers in the last recession and afterwards. The direction and strength of spillover effects between economic sentiment and GDP growth are different for the analysed CEE countries. The results are robust with respect to changing the rolling window length, additional Granger causality testing and rolling correlation coefficients.