Expenditure Elasticities of the Demand for Leisure Services

Although some research has already focused on the analysis of expenditure elasticities of leisure demand, some shortcomings with regard to the content and the underlying theoretical model as well as the applied methods exist. This paper aims at avoiding these problems to provide consistent derivatives of leisure service expenditure elasticities. Therefore, a regular demand system is derived from microeconomic duality theory. To implement leisure specific demand factors (i.e., demand- and supply-based sports and recreational opportunities as well as sports and recreational preferences) while still being consistent with neoclassical demand theory, the basic model is extended by applying the demographic translation framework. Data of the continuous household budget survey (n=7,724) from Germany is used for the estimation of the derived demand system. It is shown how sensitive the results are depending on the applied (censored) regression model: 16 out of 18 analyzed services are indicated as luxury goods based on the findings of the Tobit model type I but as necessities based on the findings of the Tobit model type II. Possible implications are presented and discussed.