Using UK household expenditure data spanning over four decades (1960–2000), this paper employs Engel’s needs-based approach to analyzing household expenditure patterns and finds evidence for the existence of a stable hierarchy of expenditure patterns at low levels of household income....

How does the consumer’s predisposition to seek arousing new sensations affect their tendency to accumulate knowledge about consumption activities? Using recent insights about the dynamic interaction of learning mechanisms that are part of the individual’s genetic endowment, we argue that,...

The tendency of sectoral demand to satiate has long been argued to be a key driver of the structural change in an economy (Pasinetti 1981; Saviotti 2001). This literature raises the question as to what extent cross-sectional patterns of household expenditure can be used to make inferences about how...

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...

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...

This paper studies the diversity of household consumption spending, i.e. how widely households distribute their spending across different types of goods. Using detailed expenditure data from the UK (1990 - 2015), we show that the diversity of household spending rises in income up to a certain...