Conspicuous Consumption and Race: Evidence from South Africa

Wolfhard Kaus

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography

Abstract: A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent consumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarce empirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African household data and finds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable White households. In an emerging economy context, this is especially important as it carries implications for spending on future assets. This paper explores whether the differences in visible expenditures can be explained with a signaling model of status seeking. Among Black households, spending on visible consumption is found to change predictably with different reference group incomes.

Keywords: Conspicuous consumption; Signaling; Status; South Africa Length 22 pages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D83 J15 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Conspicuous consumption and “race”: Evidence from South Africa (2013)
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:esi:evopap:2010-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography Deutschhausstrasse 10, 35032 Marburg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christoph Mengs ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).