Working More to Pay the Mortgage: Household Debt, Interest Rates, and Family Labor Supply

Michał Zator

Journal of Finance, 2025, vol. 80, issue 2, 1171-1207

Abstract: I show that households work and earn more (less) when their floating‐rate mortgage payments quasi‐exogenously increase (decrease). The response is sizable and asymmetric: on average, households adjust their income by 35% of the change in their mortgage payment, but the response is significantly stronger following an increase in payments. While men in dual‐earner, childless households respond the most on average, the asymmetry is most pronounced for women and young workers, who respond particularly strongly to payment increases. The asymmetry of the labor supply elasticity may help explain the wide range of elasticities found in previous research.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13413

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jfinan:v:80:y:2025:i:2:p:1171-1207

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.afajof.org/membership/join.asp

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Finance from American Finance Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().