Engel's law is known to be extraordinarily consistent across time and space. To substantiate the distinction between necessities and luxuries, already Ernst Engel (1895) approached a behaviorally founded comprehensive assessment of structural changes in consumer expenditures. To build upon...

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...

In Germany, solar thermal systems (STSy) have only diffused to a minor extent as 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 northwestern Germany in 2007, we examine...