Materialism on the March: From conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption?
Paul Frijters and
Andrew Leigh
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2008, vol. 37, issue 5, 1937-1945
Abstract:
This paper inserts Veblen's [Veblen, T., 1898, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The Viking Press, New York] concepts of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption into a very simple model. Individuals have the choice to either invest their time into working, leading to easily observable levels of consumption, or into conspicuous leisure, whose effect on utility depends on how observable leisure is. We let the visibility of leisure depend positively on the amount of time an individual and her neighbors have lived in the same area. Individuals optimize across conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. If population turnover is high, individuals are made worse off, since the visibility of conspicuous leisure then decreases and the status race must be played out primarily via conspicuous consumption. Analyzing interstate mobility in the US, we find strong support for our hypothesis: a 1percentage point rise in population turnover increases the average work week of non-migrants by 7Â min. We end with discussing the pros and cons of mobility taxes to offset the negative externality of population turnover on the visibility of conspicuous leisure.
Keywords: Conspicuous; consumption; Conspicuous; leisure; Materialism; Labor; supply; Mobility; Status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W5H ... 4f6ac9633ca2bf1674c2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Materialism on the March: From Conspicuous Leisure to Conspicuous Consumption? (2005) 
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:eee:soceco:v:37:y:2008:i:5:p:1937-1945
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza
More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().