This paper investigates the influence of the political regime on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption. We use the separation of Germany into the communist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. Relying on household data that are...

This paper analyzes persuasive advertising and pricing in oligopoly if firms sell differentiated products and consumers have heterogeneous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive...

Traditionally, it has been argued that profit sharing can increase employment and welfare because it lowers marginal labor costs without reducing total cost or labor income. In this paper, we show that profit sharing can also represent a Pareto-improvement if labor supply is excessive due to...

Relative consumption effects or status concerns that feature jealousy (in the sense of Dupor and Liu, AER 2003) boost consumption expenditure. If consumption is financed by labour income, such status considerations increase labour supply and, hence, the tax base. A higher taxable income, in...

This paper explores the determinants of survival in a life-and-death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested in seeing whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...

We investigate the prevalence of factors associated with participation in the sex market among men resident in Britain using data from Britain's National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-2, 199-2001,Natsal-3, 2010-2012). The percentage of men asking for paid sex is about 12 per...

Did the financial crisis spread from distressed banks to households through a contraction of the credit supply? We study this question with a dataset that contains observations on all accounts in Danish banks as well as comprehensive information about individual account holders and banks. We...

Using a unique dataset on health club attendance from Quebec, we look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance and how these relate to a reported measure of self-control problems at the time of contract signing. We find that a large majority of contract choices appear...