Whereas a large number of empirical studies have been devoted to analysing consumer demand for specific products, much less attention has been paid to the household's demand for product variety (the number of different products consumed in a specific time period). This paper analyses consumer...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of demand in the German automobile industry. Our primary goal is to refine the existing literature on that topic by exploring the impact of uniqueness seeking behaviour of individuals on the demand schedule. Using a dataset on the segment of...

In the present paper we examine the German cinema market using time series data of 49 years. Applying estimation techniques such as OLS, 2SLS and SUR, we identify interrelations between the number of screens, the average real prices and the demand for movies per inhabitant. Furthermore, we test...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...

This paper assesses the accuracy of decomposing income risk into permanent and transitory components using income and consumption data. We develop a specific approximation to the optimal consumption growth rule and use Monte Carlo evidence to show that this approximation can provide a robust...

Engel's verbal formulation of his Law expresses a "negativ stochastic association" of the bivariate distribution of income and food share across the population. Among the many different definitions of association four are chosen: Kendall's tau, negative quadrant dependence, stochastically...

Since the beginning of transition, the level and structure of average food consumption and expenditure of Russian households has changed substantially. This development has gone together with a steep increase in the share of food in total expenditure. Notable differences with respect to food...

In this paper we study the impact of the income distribution on innovation through the demand for quality goods. For simplicity, we assume that there are two types of consumers, rich and poor. The income distribution is measured by the population share of the poor and the relative income of the...