EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Education debt and household consumption upgrading: Positive incentives or inhibitions?

Mianbi Xie, Xin Chen and Yingying Zhao

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 10, 1-26

Abstract: Household education debt is closely related to household consumption, and education itself is also a developmental high-quality consumption. Based on the panel data of five phases of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) from 2013 to 2021, this paper explores the impact of households’ education debt on improving household consumption enthusiasm and consumption upgrading with households as the basic unit. The study finds that education debt can significantly promote the upgrading of household consumption. Mechanism analysis shows that education debt can promote the upgrading of household consumption by improving the level of Internet consumption, and there are different degrees of moderating effect on household risk attitude. Heterogeneity analysis shows that household education debt has a significant positive effect on the consumption of urban and rural areas, high-financially literate and middle- and low-income households, as well as middle-leveraged households. The conclusions of this study enrich the research on the influencing factors and mechanisms of household consumption upgrading, broaden the research boundary of household debt and consumption, and have important implications for promoting education equity and consumer demand in China.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0332318 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 32318&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0332318

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0332318

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-10-18
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0332318