American Living Standards: Evidence from Recreational Expenditures

Dora L. Costa

No 7148, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: I use consumer expenditure surveys from 1888-1890, 1917-1919, 1935-1936, 1972-1973, and 1991 to determine whether trends in real income per capita are consistent with trends in recreational budget shares and to establish trends in inequality in recreational expenditures. I find that changes in real total expenditures per capita are likely to underestimate the increase in living standards, particularly during times of innovation in consumer goods and reductions in hours such as in the 1920s and the 1970s and 1980s. Real per capita total expenditures fell by 1.2 percent per year between 1919 and 1935 and rose by 1.8 percent per year between 1972 and 1991. In contrast, trends in recreational expenditure shares imply that between 1919 and 1935 real per capita total expenditures rose by 1.2 percent per year and between 1972 and 1991 by 3.6 percent per year. The bias in conventional measures of per capita real total expenditures may therefore have been 2.4 percentage points per year between 1919 and 1935 and 1.8 percentage points per year between 1972 and 1991. I also find that lower income households experienced a larger increase in living standards than higher income households, perhaps because of decreases in the work hours of lower relative to higher income workers, technological change that lowered the price of recreational goods and created new products that increased demand for recreation, and increased public provision of recreational goods.

JEL-codes: D12 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
Date: 1999-05
Note: DAE
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7148.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7148

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7148
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().