Who Sees What? Demographics and the Visibility of Consumer Expenditures

Abstract:     
This paper analyzes data from Heffetz's (2007) visibility survey. The survey was designed to quantify the relative cultural visibility of different consumer expenditures among U.S. households. We explore the relationship between respondents' demographic characteristics and the expenditures they perceive as visible. We find substantial variation - both across demographic characteristics and across consumption categories - in the relation between demographics and expenditure visibility. Furthermore, we find that our demographic variables have no predictive power for the visibility of some expenditures (such as cars, air travel, jewelry, and home furnishings). At the same time, for most other expenditures (including, for example, housing and utilities, clothing and laundry) there seem to exist visibility subcultures, with different visibility levels among different demographic groups. Finally, while we find sex to be a weak predictor of expenditure visibility, race stands out as a strong determinant of visibility in our data.

Keywords: expenditure visibility, cultural visibility of expenditures, demographics and visibility, visibility subcultures

JEL Classifications: J1, Z13

Working Paper Series