Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. What is novel about our contribution is that we were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and...

I propose a life-cycle model where a finitely lived risk averse agent finances her housing investment choosing to provide a down payment. After signing the mortgage contract, the agent may strategically default and move into the rental market. Risk neutral lenders efficiently price mortgages...

The balance sheet adjustment in the household sector was a prominent feature of the Great Recession that is widely believed to have held back the cyclical recovery of the US economy. A key question for the US outlook is therefore whether household deleveraging has ended or whether further...

Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...

Using a novel dataset for the US states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of US consumption since 2007 in the aftermath of the housing bubble. By separating the concepts of deleveraging and debt overhang -- a flow...

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of insolvency frameworks for private sector debt deleveraging and for the resolution of non-performing loans (NPL). We construct an aggregate insolvency framework index (IFI), which is used as explanatory variable in the empirical analysis. By...

We propose a novel framework to identify distressed households by taking account of both the solvency and the liquidity situation of an individual household. Using the data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey and the country-level data on non-performing loans we calibrate our...

Sound household financial conditions are relevant for both financial and monetary stability. Therefore, we analyse household financial fragility in a sample of euro area countries with the aim to shed some light on the nature of the large debt increase accumulated in recent years. We focus on...

We study how unemployment affects the over-indebtedness of households using the new European Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). First, we assess the role of different labor market statuses (i.e. employed, unemployed, disabled, retired, etc.) and other household characteristics...