Income Inequality and Income-Class Consumption Patterns

LaVaughan Henry

Economic Commentary, 2014, issue Oct

Abstract: This Commentary investigates whether there has been a growing divergence in the consumption of luxury and necessity goods across income classes. The analysis shows that while necessities represent a majority of the consumption basket for lower and middle income quintiles, their consumption of necessities in inflation-adjusted dollars has been declining in the face of higher prices of such goods and stagnant income growth. Higher income quintiles have seen increases in their consumption of luxuries, simultaneous with a decline in their consumption of necessities.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-ec-201418 Full Text (text/html)
https://www.clevelandfed.org/-/media/project/cleve ... ion-patterns-pdf.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcec:00023

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Commentary from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().