Develops and discusses a theoretical framework for the study of taste from a pragmatist point of view.

Production began to decline, more and more signs of recession occurred, the GDP diminished in real terms so that the signs of economic crisis became visible in all components of the social system (and in the culture subsystem, as well). In this context, the unanimous striving for international...

We examine the impact of aging on wine prices and the performance of wine as a long-term investment, using a unique historical database for five long-established Bordeaux wines that we construct from auction and dealer prices. We estimate the life-cycle price patterns with a regression model...

This paper intends to examine the consumption of art by some of the most important aristocratic Florentine families from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the last few decades economic and social historians have showed an increasing interest in consumption and...

We provide new micro evidence on the discussion about the relationship between financial development and welfare. Relying on the concept of local financial development our analysis focuses on three dimensions of household welfare: vulnerability to poverty, investment, and consumption smoothing....

We examine 567 estimates of habit formation from 69 studies published in peer-reviewed journals. In contrast to previous results for most fields of empirical economics, we find no publication bias in the literature. The median estimated strength of habit formation equals 0.4, but the estimates...

This paper sheds new light on the interactions between business cycles and the consumption distribution. We use Consumer Expenditure Survey data and a factor model to characterize the cyclical dynamics of the consumption distribution. We first establish that our approach is able to closely match...

The cost of children is a critical parameter used in determining many economic policies. For instance, correctly setting the tax deduction for families with children requires assessing the true household cost of children. Evaluating child poverty at the individual level requires making a clear...

The aim of this paper is to provide a reliable set of income, own-price, and cross-price elasticities of demand for the consumer goods, foods and alcohol beverages based on Almost Ideal Demand System model applied to the most relevant Czech data set of Household Budget Statistics. While we...

We propose a consistent utility-based framework to jointly explain a household's decisions on purchase incidence, brand choice and purchase quantity. The approach differs from other approaches, currently available in the literature, as it is able to take into account consumption dynamics. In the...