For over a year now, various surveys have been reporting that Canadian businesses and consumers are rather pessimistic about the economic situation. Assessing the extent to which this wave of pessimism may be causing an economic slowdown presents a methodological challenge.
At this seminar, Kevin Moran and Dalibor Stevanovic presented the results of their most recent CIRANO study, made with the help of Adam Abdel Kader Touré, in which they suggest that correlations between confidence and economic activity do indeed contain a causal component.
