Household debt repayment behaviour: what role do institutions play?

Burcu Duygan-Bump and Charles Grant
Additional contact information
Burcu Duygan-Bump: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/burcu-duygan-bump.htm

No QAU08-3, Supervisory Research and Analysis Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Abstract: Household debt repayment behavior has been understudied, especially empirically, despite the heightened debate on rising household debt, personal bankruptcy filings, and arrears. In this paper, we use data from the European Community Household Panel to analyze the determinants of household debt arrears. The paper's primary aim is to understand the role of institutions in household arrears by exploiting cross-country differences and the panel nature of the data set. We start our analysis by showing that falling into arrears has important long-term consequences for employment, self-employment, home-ownership, and health. Next, we show how arrears themselves are the result of adverse events that affect a household, such as bad health or unemployment. Finally, we show that there are important cross-country differences in how households react to these adverse events. These differences can be partly explained by local financial and judicial institutions. Indicators covering contract enforcement and the degree of credit information sharing are used to capture the costs associated with default. In particular, we show that while adverse shocks are highly important, the extent to which they affect household debt repayment depends crucially on the penalty for defaulting.

Keywords: Consumer credit; Bankruptcy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bostonfed.org/bankinfo/qau/wp/2008/qau0803.htm (text/html)
http://www.bostonfed.org/bankinfo/qau/wp/2008/qau0803.pdf (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:fip:fedbqu:qau08-3

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Supervisory Research and Analysis Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Spozio ().