D12 - Consumer Economics: Empirical AnalysisReturn

With Saudi Arabia's tendency to implement a policy of economic openness to the world from the early 1980s, the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption (society of consumption and imitation) has increased. Due to the adoption of the concepts of economic globalization, changing consumption patterns, tourism and travelling and the spread of multi-national companies which market and promote their products over different mass media, this phenomenon has remarkably gone up. Over time, the effects of this phenomenon have spread to low-income groups, especially young people, and it has been a motive for some young people to earn money illegally to afford it. In addition, banks and financial institutions are providing financial facilities to individuals to finance unjustified conspicuous consumption. This paper aims to identify the concept of this phenomenon at the social, economic and cultural levels. It aims to clarify the most significant factors affecting this phenomenon and its subsequent economic and social effects and risks. Then, it provides suitable recommendations to curb this phenomenon spread in the future. This paper conducted social survey via a sample questionnaire for (300) respondents in three different areas in Saudi Arabia. The survey was conducted during the period from January 2023 till September 2023. It has used also Household Income and Expenditure Survey by General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) in Saudi Arabia (2007, 2013, and 2018). The results of this paper indicate that social status and the dominance of customs and traditions, bank facilities and installment sales play a major role in increasing the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption in Saudi Arabia. This paper recommends rationalizing conspicuous consumption to reduce its negative economic effects in the future, achieving efficiency in the use of resources, reducing waste, and spreading the culture of saving and investment in Saudi society.

This paper deals with the problem of how the risk perception among retail customers is affected by the consumer protection regulation on the financial market. Through a questionnaire survey, we have measured the effect of selected consumer protection measures on banking or investment decisions taken by a young (student) population. These measures included the most common elements of financial regulation, such as bank deposit insurance, corporate bond prospectus, licenced fund management and securities broker indemnity insurance. Our results show that protective state intervention represents strong stimuli for customer decision-making with a widely misleading effect. It overshadows other factors, including individual qualification, risk-reward preference and demographic attributes, all of which were found to be insignificant. Since the surveyed measures reached a similar level of effect yet they offer different substance, this outcome has important policymaking implications.

The objective of this paper is to examine one of the essential behavioural concepts - the 'status quo bias' - on the available macroeconomic data. The recent global economic crisis has provided a valuable opportunity for analysing the concept and ensured that relevant and sufficient inputs for such academic research are available. Specifically, to study the 'status quo bias', this paper studies the relation between consumption and income before and after the 2008 economic crisis in a selected country. As such, this study attempts to provide answers to such questions as: How strongly is consumption dependent on income prior to and after the crisis? What are the forces behind consumption during the assessed period - income or existing quality of living? What conclusions can be drawn for public finance from the analysis? The findings indicate that the 'status quo bias' behavioural concept could be confirmed based on the tested macroeconomic data, and possible implications for public finance are presented as well.

This paper investigates the transmission from interest rates to household saving behaviour when introducing two main innovations of analysing this relationship. The first one is based on the use of a set of client interest rates instead of one monetary policy rate. This step enables us to distinguish impacts of the substitution and income effects in more detail. The second major innovation lies in the division of households into income categories, which provides us with more observations and thus makes it possible to conduct this analysis even for a single country. Using the generalized method of moments for the dynamic panel data, we analyse Czech household behaviour for the period 2004-2015. The results highlight that when we ignore details of the transmission channel and use only a monetary policy rate, we lose crucial information about contradictory impacts of the substitution and income effects that are primarily reflected in the client interest rates. This fact may clarify most of the interest rate-savings rate puzzle.

This study surveys the conventional methods and their limitations in assessing motives for private transfers. Based on the concept of "effective altruism" - a genuine altruist offers help instead of demanding, this study proposes a normative and discriminative strategy to help distinguish the transfer motives, focusing on whether income transfer persists over time. Its application to Chinese interfamily transfers reveals that altruistic motives do exist but play an insignificant role at the aggregate level.

We model the future tobacco consumption, size of smoking population and governmental tax revenues in the Czech Republic. The main model assumption states that smokers determine their future tobacco consumption behaviour as adolescents. Further assumptions make the model applicable to the data from the Czech National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Future teenage smoking rates and average consumption are the inputs to the model; consumption growth coefficients for each age category are estimated using zero-inflated negative binomial regression. Several scenarios are built to model possible developments, including extreme cases. All our scenarios show that all model outcomes are going to grow until 2028 in a very similar pattern. In particular, the projected number of smokers in 2028 is by 4-8% higher than in 2013, the total daily tobacco consumption and tax revenue by 7-26%. This increase is induced by aging of large birth cohorts.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the interplay between variables pertaining to the satis-faction of life and economic sentiments of citizens of selected European countries. The analysis of the connections will be conducted based on existing subjective primary data. The data in question are results of international comparative surveys (European Social Survey, ESS; the OECD's Better Life Initiative) and results of consumer economic sentiment surveys ordered by the European Commission. The research procedure also benefitted from the selected items of literature available in the form of books and articles. Population economic sentiments are subject to cyclical changes connected with the changes in economic situation in individual countries. The analysis of secondary data allows for the con-clusion that there is a statistically significant direct or indirect strong relationship between assessments of life satisfaction and consumer confidence indicator. The grouping of the researched countries based on secondary data has made it possible to capture the similarities between individual states.

Health-motivated taxes have spread over the world to reduce increasing obesity and corresponding health care costs. These taxes have not yet been implemented in the Czech Republic, in contrast to some other, mainly European countries. However, the introduction of a fat tax has been discussed frequently in the Czech Republic during the last few years; here, we provide empirical evidence in order for this public debate to be better informed. We use detailed microeconomic data to estimate the impact of potential fat taxes on household expenditure and government revenues in the Czech Republic. We evaluate the impact of three types of fat taxes: ad valorem, specific per kilogram of product and specific per kilogram of fat. We simulate these in such a way that they all raise the same budget revenues as a 10% ad valorem tax on fat-rich products. Accounting for higher food expenditures in the aggregate national accounts than in the detailed microeconomic data results into higher budget revenues, 7.3 and 6.1 billion Czech korunas, respectively. Overall we find, and thus confirm the overwhelming evidence from other countries, that fat taxes are regressive in income.

Inflation rates have traditionally been measured by the percentage change in the price level of a market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households. The market basket represents the spending patterns of average household. However, households differ in their spending patterns and there are differences in the price changes of various goods and services. Therefore, different households experience different inflation rates. This paper finds that these differences have been significant in the Czech Republic during the period 1995-2010. Only around 60% of households actually experienced an inflation rate that was similar to the national average. Furthermore, the higher the average inflation rate over time, the lower the percentage of households whose inflation rate was similar to that average. The main determiners of inflation were expenditures for housing and energy, food and non-alcoholic drinks. In most years, pensioners and low-income households faced significantly higher inflation rates than the average rate for the whole population.

The paper deals with the hypothesis of housing price bubble in the Czech economy. This topic is very popular among economists worldwide now, especially because of the U.S. housing crisis and subsequent collapses on financial markets. However, surprisingly there are not many analyses dealing with the Czech housing market (besides e.g. very brief Financial Stability Report published by the Czech National Bank in 2008) and with the possible housing bubble burst. The first standard bubble indicators like P/I ratio are used to identify the bubble possibility on the Czech housing market. As the second step a regression analysis (VAR model) is being used for deeper analysis of the situation. The whole analysis is complicated by a lack of relevant data and quite short-time series.