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Income Inequality and Status Symbols: The Case of Fine Wine Imports

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2019

Britta Niklas
Affiliation:
Institute of Development Research and Development Policy, Ruhr-University Bochum, Universitaetsstr. 105, 44789Bochum, Germany; e-mail: britta.niklas@rub.de.
Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada
Affiliation:
Institute of Development Research and Development Policy, Ruhr-University Bochum, Universitaetsstr. 105, 44789Bochum, Germany; e-mail: elkhan.r.sadik-zada@rub.de.

Abstract

This survey investigates the inequality-fine wine imports nexus. To this end, the study employs cointegration techniques to analyze two panel datasets, one of which will analyze data from 12 countries between 1871 and 2018, and another that analyzes data from 66 countries between 1995 and 2017. Estimations indicate that income inequality leads to more fine wine imports in the long run. Changes in income have only a short-term effect on fine wine imports. Nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) estimators reveal an asymmetric long-run relationship between income inequality and fine wine imports in the cases of Argentina and the United States. (JEL Classifications: C19, D01, D12, D31, L66)

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2019

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the editor and an anonymous reviewer for valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank the participants attending our session at the 13th Annual AAWE Conference in Vienna for their helpful comments.

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