 Inequality, household debt and financial instability: An agent-based perspectiveJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018, vol. 149, issue C, 434-458 Abstract: Our paper contributes to the literature on the causes of the 2007–2008 financial crisis in the United States. By means of an agent-based model, we replicate an artificial credit-network economy in order to assess the impact of growing income inequality in the presence of peer effects and home equity borrowing. We show that the resulting debt-financed consumption boom jeopardises the stability of the economic system, thus paving the way for a financial crisis. Our model includes a behavioural rule for consumption based on expenditure cascades, a hierarchical structure of household finance, an articulated credit market with collateralised consumption loans and mortgages and a simple housing market. Results show that the model is able to capture the economic and social pressure of inequality on low and middle income households that pushes them to increase their consumption via home equity extraction. Rising non-performing loans lead to higher bad debt on the banks’ balance sheets and, consequently, to the emergence of a crisis as an endogenous dynamic. Keywords: Agent-based models; Inequality; Equity extraction; Household debt; Financial crises (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:149:y:2018:i:c:p:434-458 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.01.010 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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