IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v98y2016i5p863-879.html

Trickle-Down Consumption

Author

Listed:
  • Marianne Bertrand

    (University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, NBER, and CEPR)

  • Adair Morse

    (University of California at Berkeley, Haas School of Business, and NBER)

Abstract

We document that nonrich households consume a larger share of their current income when exposed to higher top income and consumption levels. Permanent income, wealth effects, and upward local price pressures cannot provide the sole explanation for this finding. Instead, we show that the budget shares that nonrich households allocate to more visible goods and services rise with top income levels, consistent with status-maintaining explanations for our primary finding. Nonrich households might have saved up to 3% more annually by the mid-2000s had incomes at the top grown at the same rate as median income since the early 1980s.

Suggested Citation

  • Marianne Bertrand & Adair Morse, 2016. "Trickle-Down Consumption," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 98(5), pages 863-879, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:98:y:2016:i:5:p:863-879
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00613
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:98:y:2016:i:5:p:863-879. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The MIT Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.