The Consumption Function of Luxury Goods

Abstract:

The goal of this thesis will be to formulate an economic model that exposes the relationship between consumption of luxury goods and selected factors which includes advertising, disposable income, interest rate, price index and stock premium.

By building the Multiple Linear Regressions model to formulate the consumption function and using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) as the method, it becomes apparent that advertising, disposable income and the previous quarter´s disposable income are the major variables to affect luxury good consumption, of all the factors. Furthermore, the previous quarter´s disposable income has a slightly higher effect than the current one on luxury consumption. Similar studies, which focus on luxury items, have proposed models that test a single or a few variables at a time, and others that concentrate on durable goods have a wide range of variables to examine. I attempt to combine both in my model to test luxury consumption with a wide range of variables.