This paper is the first attempt towards directly testing the existence of status seeking behavior of the poor for a developing economy, India, with the help of a large dataset. The paper empirically validates status consciousness among the relatively poor for both rural and urban areas across...

Industry sentiment and practitioners’ observations link income and wealth to private-label demand. The intuition is that decreasing income and wealth increase the demand for (cheaper) private labels. Recent academic research focusses on measuring the causal effect of income and wealth changes...

Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data, we obtain summary measures of the distributions of income and consumption for each quarter between 1980 and 1994. We find that the trends in the distribution of income and consumption and the response of these trends to changes in inflation and...

We study a series of sustained growth models in which households' preferences are affected by the consumption of other households as summarized by average consumption. In endogenous growth models, the equilibrium paths involve lower savings and lower growth than the corresponding efficient...

This paper studies the nature, evolution, and sources of inflation heterogeneity across households in France and Germany. Inflation differences are large and persistent. The two main sources of inflation heterogeneity are spatial differences in the prices paid for the same product and...

In a model calibrated to match micro- and macroeconomic evidence on household income dynamics, we show that a modest degree of heterogeneity in household preferences or beliefs is sufficient to match empirical measures of wealth inequality in the United States. The heterogeneity-augmented...

Choice defaults are an increasingly popular public policy tool. Yet there is little knowledge of the distributional consequences of such nudges for different groups in society. We report results from an elicitation study in the residential electricity market in Switzerland in which we contrast...