The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessedextraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social andcultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm’s statementthat “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

This paper examines the profile of poverty in Tajikistan, the most remoteand poorest of the independent states of the Former Soviet Union. Datais used from the first nationally representative household surveyconducted in Tajikistan since independence and the cessation of the civilwar. The...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to externalfinance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household ExternalFinance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

Trends im Konsumverhalten der Haushalte, eine veränderte industrielleArbeitsteilung in Asien, neue Möglichkeiten der Informationsversorgungsowie die kommende Altengesellschaft haben das Interesse von Politikund Medien an dem nichtproduzierenden Sektor in Japan in den letztenJahren stark...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budgetshares distributions (HBSDs) —defined as the share of household total expenditurespent for purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italianhouseholds in the period 1989-2004....