The second half of the 1990s has seen substantialchanges in the wealth of Americanhouseholds, primarily owing to movements inthe stock market. From mid-1994 to mid-1997, the aggregate value of household sector equityholdings (including those owned by nonprofits, mutualfunds, and pensions and...

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...