Trends im Konsumverhalten der Haushalte, eine veränderte industrielleArbeitsteilung in Asien, neue Möglichkeiten der Informationsversorgungsowie die kommende Altengesellschaft haben das Interesse von Politikund Medien an dem nichtproduzierenden Sektor in Japan in den letztenJahren stark...

The second half of the 1990s has seen substantialchanges in the wealth of Americanhouseholds, primarily owing to movements inthe stock market. From mid-1994 to mid-1997, the aggregate value of household sector equityholdings (including those owned by nonprofits, mutualfunds, and pensions and...

The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessedextraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social andcultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm’s statementthat “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

This paper examines the profile of poverty in Tajikistan, the most remoteand poorest of the independent states of the Former Soviet Union. Datais used from the first nationally representative household surveyconducted in Tajikistan since independence and the cessation of the civilwar. The...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to externalfinance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household ExternalFinance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budgetshares distributions (HBSDs) —defined as the share of household total expenditurespent for purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italianhouseholds in the period 1989-2004....

In order to explain the growth of obesity in industrialized and transitioneconomies, a behavioral approach to food intake and overconsumption of caloriesis presented. It is argued that changes in food consumption patterns are one of themain drivers behind the imbalance of calories consumed and...

This paper shows how sustainable consumption patterns can spread within a population viaprocesses of social learning even though a strong individual learning bias may favorenvironmentally harmful products. We present a model depicting how the biased transmission ofdifferent behaviors via...