We measure how different the shapes of Engel curves are across 59 commodity groups. The same analysis is carried out for their derivatives and variances. While Engel curves possess a relatively homogeneous shape, significantly more heterogeneity is present in derivatives and when particular...

Certain properties of Engel curves have been linked to the occurrence of structural change in the economy (Pasinetti 1981, Metcalfe et al. 2006, Saviotti 2001). From an empirical perspective, however, very little has been done to examine (i) whether indeed satiation is a general property of...

Using data spanning over four decades (1960-2000), this paper employs Engel's needsbased approach to analyzing household expenditure patterns to find evidence for the existence of a stable hierarchy of expenditure patterns at low levels of household income. Second, we investigate how rising...

This paper revisits Ernst Engel's (1857) original article in which he systematically investigated the relationship between consumption expenditure and income. While he is mainly remembered today for the discovery of Engel's law, we highlight how Engel addressed in a particular way the issue of...

Economic growth tends to stimulate fundamental changes in consumption patterns as consumers who get rich tend to spread their spending more evenly across a wider variety of goods and services. Comparing cross sectional spending patterns across rich and poor countries, we investigate how this...

The identification of a VAR requires differentiating between correlation and causation. This paper presents a method to deal with this problem. Graphical models, which provide a rigorous language to analyze the statistical and logical properties of causal relations, associate a particular set of...

This paper posits that significant changes in 19th century British recreational travel patterns resulted from a change in the manner in which tourists used entertaining stimuli in order to attain pleasure. Consumers no longer merely viewed arousing stimuli, but attempted to use them to produce...

There is a growing consensus in Ecological Economics that consumer preferences are neither fixed nor given, but rather endogenously determined by socio-economic and institutional factors. Hence, policy may promote "green" preferences directly. Yet any intervention in processes of preference...

We empirically evaluate two competing explanations about how the dispersion of income within social groups affects household spending on visible goods. Using South African household expenditure data, we find evidence that precisely the reverse of the effect predicted by Charles et al. (2009)...

The size of the economy-wide rebound effect is crucial for estimating the contribution that energy efficiency improvements can make to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for understanding the drivers of energy use. Existing estimates, which vary widely, are based on computable general...