A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent consumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarce empirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African household data and finds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively more on visible...

This paper explores the role of within group social comparisons on the life satisfaction of different racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. For Whites, we find that higher group income levels are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, a result that is consistent with a preference for...