Lower-income consumers who seek to increase their perceived social status or to emulate their wealthier peers may be … more expensive vehicles than they otherwise would. The preferences for prestige are driven both by status signaling and … peer emulation motives. Furthermore, we show that larger vehicle purchases financed by auto loans lead to worse loan …

This paper shows that households with positional concerns and convex status utility use gambling to attempt … Germany, proxying the status orientation of households by their expenditures for conspicuous consumption. Our empirical … results strongly indicate that households who care about status are more likely to participate in gambling and invest more in …

This paper analyses incomes and socioeconomic status of internal migrants over time and in comparison to their new … neighbors and investigates whether status consumption is a way for newly arrived city dwellers to signal their social standing …. Using a novel dataset from the emerging economy of Kazakhstan we find that internal migrants earn an income and status …