Household debt rose sharply in the United Kingdom in the decade before the financial crisis. This paper uses household level microdata to investigate the relationship between mortgage debt and consumption. We find evidence that more highly indebted groups of households made larger cuts in...

Using a long span of expenditure survey data and a new narrative measure of exogenous income tax changes for the United Kingdom, we show that households with mortgage debt exhibit large and persistent consumption responses to changes in their income. Homeowners without a mortgage, in contrast,...

In response to an interest rate change, mortgagors in the United Kingdom and United States adjust their spending significantly (especially on durable goods) but outright home-owners do not. While the dollar change in mortgage payments is nearly three times larger in the United Kingdom than in...

In this paper, we first develop a theoretical framework with three types of household: outright homeowners, mortgagors and renters. We then examine empirically how household debt affects the response of labour supply to shocks to income, mortgage interest rates and house prices for each type of...

Household debt and house prices in the United Kingdom rose substantially between 1987 and 2006. In this paper we use a calibrated overlapping generations model of the household sector to examine the extent to which changes in demographics, lower inflation, and a lower long-run real interest rate...

Using matched microdata for the UK, I estimate two distinct channels via which credit supply shocks affect mortgage debt: one that operates through price conditions in credit markets; and another that operates through non-price credit conditions and affects the quantity of credit supplied by...

What explains the strong comovement between house prices and job losses over the UK business cycle? To study this question, I build a general equilibrium model with collateral constraints, endogenous job separation and housing shocks, and confront it with macroeconomic data via Bayesian methods....

'Consumption risk sharing' refers to the ability of agents to insure or protect their consumption against shocks to their income, for example, by borrowing and lending or holding claims on foreign equity. So measuring the extent of risk sharing informs us about how consumption is likely to...

'Zombie lending' occurs when a lender supports an otherwise insolvent borrower. Recent studies document that zombie lending to European firms has been widespread following the onset of the European sovereign debt crisis. This paper develops a quantitative model to study the impact of these...

Over the past four decades, real interest rates have risen then fallen across the industrialised world. Over the same period, nominal investment rates fell, while house prices and household debt ratios rose. I explain these four trends with a fifth — the widespread fall in the relative price...