Debt Overhang and Deleveraging in the US Household Sector: Gauging the Impact on Consumption

Bruno Albuquerque and Georgi Krustev

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Using a novel dataset for the US states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of US consumption since 2007, in the aftermath of the housing bubble. By separating the concepts of deleveraging and debt overhang—a flow and stock effect—we find that excessive indebtedness exerted a meaningful drag on consumption over and beyond income and wealth effects. The overall impact, however, is modest, around one-sixth of the slowdown in consumption between 2000–06 and between 2007–12—and mostly driven by states with particularly large imbalances in the household sector. This might be indicative of non-linearities, whereby indebtedness begins to bite only when misalignments from sustainable debt dynamics become more excessive.

Keywords: Credit and credit aggregates; Econometric and statistical methods; International topics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C23 C52 D12 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Debt Overhang and Deleveraging in the US Household Sector: Gauging the Impact on Consumption (2018)
Working Paper: Debt overhang and deleveraging in the US household sector: gauging the impact on consumption (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:15-47

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