Interdependencies in consumer behavior stem from either status-seeking consumption or compliance with social norms. This paper analyzes how a consumption act changes from a means to signal the consumer's status to a means of norm compliance. It is shown that such a transformation can only be...

How can economic theory explain the reasons why consumers adopt innovations? Using the example of innovations in washing machines two approaches are compared. The first focuses in the manner of household production theory on changes in constraints without specifying preferences, leading to the...

This paper focuses on how consumer motivation can be tapped in order to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies. Consumers are heterogeneous they may be guided by intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation. While information provision policies (such as the energy label for cars) may be...

We study the importance of intangible capital (R&D, software, patents) for the measurement of productivity using firm-level panel data from German manufacturing. We first document a number of facts on the evolution of intangible investment over time, and its distribution across firms. Aggregate...

In Germany, solar thermal systems (STS) have only diffused to a minor extent yet. This paper analyzes, which demand side factors are decisive for the further proliferation of this environmentally benign technology. Making use of a consumer survey in North-West Germany in 2007, we examine the...

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)...

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...

Engel's law is known to be extraordinarily consistent across time and space. Accordingly, it has been widely used to determine poverty. However, also among the poorest, a certain amount of non food spending is necessary. To substantiate the distinction between necessities and luxuries, already...

This paper analyses the effect of offshoring (i.e., the relocation of activities previously performed in-house to foreign countries) on various firm outcomes (domestic employment, production, and productivity). It uses data from the International Sourcing Survey (ISS) 2017 for Germany, linked to...