Debts on debts
Joao Faria,
Le Wang and
Zhongmin Wu ()
The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2012, vol. 23, issue 2, 203-219
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of mortgages on consumer debt and on debt on durable goods. Outstanding debt, representing mortgages, affects positively consumer debt, and the debt on durable goods. This hypothesis is empirically tested for the U.S. using PSID 2005 wave. Our results are striking. First, we find strong evidence supporting a positive association between mortgage loans and consumer debts, regardless of the measures used, the control variables used, and the methods used. The results remain unchanged when we address potential endogeneity and measurement error problems. Second, we find that the effects of mortgages on the debt on durable goods are in general smaller than the effects of mortgages on other types of debts. Third, our distributional analysis reveals an interesting pattern of the effects on consumer debt of mortgage over the distribution. Specifically, the effects monotonically decrease as the quantile increase, with the smallest effects being at the upper tail of the distribution. Finally, we also examine the short-run dynamics of the relation between mortgage and consumer debts. We find that there is no systematic relation between the growth rate of mortgage and the growth rates of consumer debts.
Keywords: Consumer expenditure; Housing; Credit; Censored regressions; Instrument variable estimation; Heteroskedasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E44 G21 R21 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940812000204
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Debts on debts (2009) 
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:eee:ecofin:v:23:y:2012:i:2:p:203-219
DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2012.02.003
Access Statistics for this article
The North American Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Hamid Beladi
More articles in The North American Journal of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().