Nearly 40 percent of Americans approaching retirement felt heavily indebted. Understanding the role secured and unsecured debt in planning becomes an urgent concern for researchers policymakers alike. Using data from 2015 National Financial Capability Study (NFCS), current study identified (mortgage auto loan) (medical credit card debt) among a national sample pre-retirees aged 51–61 years. Log...

From the view of current conditions and developing trends of the debt scale in Chinese local government, the debt crisis will explode in the near future if it cannot be controlled in an effective way. According to the regional distribution in China, except for Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hainan, the debt risk is mainly concentrated in the western region. In a further step, it can be seen th...

In this paper, we analyze the optimal default strategy of a firm when debt is convertible into equity. For this purpose, we consider a convertible consol bond in a time-independent model in the presence of bankruptcy costs and tax deductability. The optimal default and conversion strategy result from a game between equity and debt holders. We show that an optimal default of convertible debt occ...

The debt maturity of U.S. industrial firms decreased over the past three decades. This decrease in maturity is driven by the smallest firms for which the median percentage of long-term debt has decreased from 53% in 1976 to 6% in 2008. For large firms, however, debt maturity has not declined. Information asymmetry plays an important role in explaining the decrease in debt maturity, while debt a...

What is the association between debt and anxiety? Is the relationship between age and anxiety in part due to financial debt? Recently there has been a renewed interest for the reconceptualization and measurement of socioeconomic status that moves beyond the standard education, occupation, and income. This paper uses credit card debt and stress regarding debt to examine the relationship among ag...

We study the debt dynamics and sustainable debt for an open economy which borrows from abroad in order to "nance consumption. To service the debt the country may exploit a renewable resource. We show that there is for every resource stock R a critical level BH(R) of debt above which debt tends to in"nity but below which it may be steered to zero. We demonstrate how to compute BH(R) using an ODE...

We analyze the determinants of government debt under the twin assumptions that governments have limited horizons and default only when government income falls short of debt service requirements. We derive a government’s maximum sustainable debt ratio, that is, the debt ratio chosen by a myopic government whose horizon does not extend beyond its current term in office. Maximum sustainable debt v...

We study an important recent series of buyback auctions conducted by the U.S. Treasury in retiring $67.5 billion of its illiquid off-the-run debt. The Treasury was successful in buying back large amounts of illiquid debt while suffering only a small market-impact cost. The Treasury included the most-illiquid bonds more frequently in the auctions, but tended to buy back the least-illiquid of the...

The Great Recession confirmed a bedrock principle of modern consumption theory: It is impossible to explain aggregate spending behavior without knowledge of the underlying microeconomic distribution of circumstances and choices across households. National accounting frameworks therefore need to be augmented by “bottom up” measures that both (a) capture the microeconomic heterogeneity (in expend...