Garbage as a Measure of Consumption
The Guardian reports that Alexi Savov, an assistant professor of finance at New York University’s Leonard N Stern School of Business, has used municipal solid waste (MSW), or simply garbage, as a ‘new’ measure of consumption.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/05/rubbish-measure-consumption-research
In his February 2011 report Asset Pricing with Garbage, Savov makes the claim that garbage is “more volatile and more correlated with stocks than the canonical measure, National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) consumption expenditure.”
“Virtually all forms of consumption produce waste, and they do so at the time of consumption. Rates of garbage generation should be informative about rates of consumption.”
http://www.afajof.org/afa/forthcoming/6364.pdf
