Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. In this paper we present evidence from high-frequency data collections dedicated to tracking the effects of the financial crisis and...

U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since 2000, but the causes of these fluctuations are still imperfectly identified. We quantify the relative statistical impact of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, expectations, foreclosures, inequality, and...