This papers examines the potential link between household credit shocks and income inequality at the national level. For a sample of 32 developed and developing countries, we show that aggregate consumption temporarily increases in the short run and decreases in the long run in the face of...

Rising income inequality since the 1980s in the United States has generated a substantial increase in saving by the top of the income distribution, which we call the saving glut of the rich. The saving glut of the rich has been as large as the global saving glut, and it has not been associated...

We investigate the role and impact of household debt on the economic performance of the European economy during the double-dip recession of 2008-2013. We use a loan-level data set of millions of residential mortgages originated between 2000 and 2013 to calculate regional indicators of household...

We confirm the negative relationship between household debt and future GDP growth documented in Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) for a wider set of countries over the period 1950-2016. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms help explain this relationship. First, debt overhang impairs household...

Household debt levels relative to GDP have risen rapidly in many countries over the past decade. We investigate the macroeconomic impact of such increases by employing a novel estimation technique proposed by Chudik et al (2016), which tackles the problem of endogeneity present in traditional...

This paper examines Korean household's borrowing behavior and the causes of default using granular data. It tries to establish a set of models that determine the original amount and delinquency of loans, using as independent variables financial and non-financial factors extracted from individual...

A number of economists argue that household deleveraging can exert a significant drag on the economic recovery by weighing on consumption. Using a sample of OECD countries, this paper finds evidence of a negative relationship between household saving rates and changes in debt-to-income ratios....

Household debt in many advanced economies has increased significantly since the 1980s and accelerated in the years prior to the Great Recession, resulting in an aggregate reduction of saving rates in the developed economies. Some of those economies are now deleveraging, which may be affecting...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

We propose a theory of indebted demand, capturing the idea that large debt burdens by households and governments lower aggregate demand, and thus natural interest rates. At the core of the theory is the simple yet under-appreciated observation that borrowers and savers differ in their marginal...