Consumer Loan Response to Permanent Labor Income Shocks: Evidence from a Major Minimum Wage Increase

Ibrahim Ethem Guney, Yavuz Selim Hacihasanoglu and Semih Tumen

No 58, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: We investigate the impact of a substantial minimum wage increase, which became effective in January 2016, on consumer loans in Turkey. Using bank-level data and designing an original identification strategy, we ask whether the loans provided by banks with a historically high share of low-wage loan customers have increased relative to those provided by banks with a historically low share of low-wage loan customers after January 2016. Our results suggest that consumer loan flows have displayed a limited but statistically and economically meaningful increase following the minimum wage hike. This increase mostly comes from the increase in long-term general-purpose loans. Vehicle loans have also increased, while there is no change in housing loans. In the overall, the minimum wage hike has generated a moderate and transitory increase in the flow of consumer loans extended to low-wage earners in Turkey|perhaps due to delayed consumption effect. Consumption of durables, which can further increase household borrowing capacity through collateralized debt channel, has only slightly and temporarily increased. The underlying long-term trends in the stock of consumer loans have hardly changed.

Keywords: Consumer loans; labor income shocks; minimum wages; triple difference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 E24 G21 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-lma, nep-mac and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/157213/1/GLO_DP_0058.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumer Loan Response to Permanent Labor Income Shocks: Evidence from a Major Minimum Wage Increase (2017)
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:zbw:glodps:58

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().