Household Debt and Saving During the 2007 Recession

Household debt and social interactions

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consum...

Income Inequality and Household Debt

Household Saving in the Uk

The research for this report was produced under the auspices of the IFS Savings Consortium, to whom the authors are grateful for financial assistance and many useful discussions and comments in the series of seminars over the last four years. The members of the IFS Savings Consortium are: Acknowledgements The research in this report was funded by the IFS Savings Consortium and co-funded by the ...

The Rise in Household Saving

Between the early 1970s and the early 2000s, the aggregate household saving ratio in Australia declined steadily, from around 20 per cent to around zero (Graph 1). This trend was driven by a number of factors, including an increased availability of credit, falling real interest rates, more stable economic outcomes and rising asset prices, while changes in household income growth and expectation...

Stimulus without debt in a severe recession

This paper simulates the impact in a calibrated small macroeconomic model of a policy that attempts to apply sufficient effective stimulus in a severe recession without increasing the government deficit or debt, or inflation. This stimuluswithout-debt policy has two components: (1) a large standard fiscal stimulus; (2) a non-standard monetary stimulus—a large transfer from the central bank to t...