Political aspects of household finance: debt,wage bargaining,and macroeconomic (in)stability

The recent literature has shown that income inequality is one of the main causes of borrowing and debt accumulation by working households. This article explores the possibility that household indebtedness is an important cause of rising income inequality. If workers experience rising debt burdens, their cost of job loss may rise if they need labor-market income to continue borrowing and servicing existing debt. This, in turn, will reduce their bargaining power and increase income inequality, inducing workers to borrow more to maintain consumption standards, and so creating a vicious circle of rising inequality, job insecurity, and indebtedness. We believe that these dynamics may have contributed to observed simultaneous increases in income inequality and household debt prior to the recent financial crisis. To explore the two-way interaction between inequality and debt, we develop an employment rent framework that explicitly considers the impact of workers’ indebtedness on their perceived cost of job loss. This is embedded in a neo-Kaleckian macro model in which inequality spurs debt accumulation that contributes to household consumption spending and hence demand formation. Our analysis suggests that (a) workers’ borrowing behavior plays a crucial role in understanding the character of demand and growth regimes; (b) debt and workers’ borrowing behavior play an important role in the labor market by influencing workers’ bargaining power; and (c) through such channels, workers’ borrowing behavior can be a decisive factor in the determination of macroeconomic (in)stability.     

Household debt,macroprudential rules,and monetary policy

Today's Canadian economy features a historic high of household debt and persistently low growth rate. The average debt-to-GDP ratio has reached the level experienced in the U.S. just prior to the recent financial crisis. In this paper, we ask whether monetary policy should lean against the household indebtedness or macroprudential policies are better suited for the task. To provide a quantitative answer, we develop a small open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring a micro-founded banking sector. We estimate the model using Canadian data and conduct policy experiments. Our findings favor macroprudential approach to reining in indebtedness: using monetary policy that reacts to household debt increases inflation volatility and lowers borrowers' welfare, while using macroprudential policies such as lowering the loan-to-value ratio limit increases borrowers' welfare.     

Social security,saving, and macroeconomics

Arguing within the framework of a life-cycle hypothesis of consumption of the individual household, Martin Feldstein has claimed that a pay-as-you-go, unfunded social-security system implies a private-sector perception of wealth which both depresses private saving and raises aggregate consumption. But the effects in a macro-economic context are not the same. With less than full employment, perceived increments to private wealth in social security or any other government obligations should increase current and planned future consumption and saving, raising employment and output. With full employment, as long as monetary policy is appropriately accommodating, such increments to wealth should raise prices but leave all real variables, including capital accumulation, unaffected. Increases in social-security wealth would merely substitute for real private wealth in the form of explicit government bonds. Econometric estimates from corrected U.S. data on social security, public debt, income, and employment are consistent with these hypotheses.     

财富不平等会抑制金融素养对家庭借贷行为的作用效果吗*——基于CHFS数据的经验分析

本文基于2013年中国家庭金融调查（CHFS）数据,选用工具变量法,考察了金融素养对城乡家庭借贷行为影响的差异性,并验证了财富不平等扩大会抑制金融素养对家庭借贷行为的影响。研究发现：（1）金融素养是影响家庭借贷行为的重要因素。户主金融素养水平的改善显著提高了家庭发生借贷的概率与家庭借贷规模。（2）金融素养对城乡家庭借贷行为的影响存在明显差异,金融素养的提高对信贷约束较为严重的农村家庭借贷行为的促进作用更大。（3）财富不平等对家庭借贷行为存在明显的抑制作用,财富不平等的扩大减少了家庭借贷需求,降低了家庭发生借贷的概率和家庭负债规模。（4）随着家庭财富不平等程度的扩大,金融素养对家庭借贷行为的促进作用受到抑制。基于以上结论,政府应该大力开展消费者金融素养教育,注重家庭收入分配合理性,从而推动我国消费金融市场的健康发展。     

The Financial Crisis of 1929 Reexamined: The Role of Soaring Inequality

The financial crisis of 1929 that triggered the Great Depression has been endlessly studied. Still there is little consensus regarding what caused it. This article claims that wage stagnation and exploding inequality fueled three dynamics that set the stage for a financial crisis. First, consumption was constrained by the smaller share of total income accruing to workers, thereby restricting investment opportunities in the real economy. Flush with greater income and wealth, the elite flooded financial markets with credit, helping keep interest rates low and encouraging the creation of new credit instruments, some of which recycled the rich's surplus assets as debt to those less well off. Second, greater inequality pressured households to find ways to consume more in order to maintain their relative social status, resulting in reduced household saving, greater household debt, and possibly longer work hours. Third, as the rich took larger shares of income and wealth, they gained relatively more command over everything, including ideology. Reducing taxes on the rich, favoring business over labor, and failing to regulate newly evolving credit instruments flowed out of this ideology.     

Income Distribution,Household Debt and Growth in Modern Financialized Economies

Abstract:

We analyze some core features of the institutional transformation of the Canadian and U.S. economies over the last half century, as they became increasingly financialized economies resting on household consumption as the key contributor to economic growth, despite weak growth in real wages and personal disposable income. This growth in consumption spending is highly fragile not only because it is a debt-led growth that has relied on an unsustainable expansion of household indebtedness largely dependent on credit bubbles in the housing market, but also because of the perverse form of this indebtedness. Studied from the angle of disaggregated household consumption/saving behavior, it is the poorest and most vulnerable households who have been building up unsustainable debt, thereby presaging increasing financial fragility and crises.     

The rise of part-time employment in the great recession: Its causes and macroeconomic effects

During the Great Recession, the U.S. economy witnessed a substantial rise in part-time employment for a sustained period. We extend the New Keynesian unemployment model by Galí et al. (2012) to allow substitutions between full-time and part-time labor, and estimate the model’s parameters by using the Bayesian method. In our model, households and firms can optimally allocate full-time and part-time labor, and disturbances exist in part-time labor supply (household disutility from part-time labor) and part-time labor demand (firms’ efficiency to use part-time labor). As for the Great Recession, the initial increase in part-time employment at the outset of the financial crisis is mostly explained by the rise of the risk premia; the persistently high level of part-time employment in the later period is mainly explained by an exogenous increase in part-time labor supply. A part-time labor supply shock also explains a significant portion of slow recovery in the gross wage during the recession, as the shock lowers the part-time wage and the proportion of full-time workers in total employment. Notably, the results from our model suggest that though the transition from full-time to part-time jobs contributed to mitigating the sharp contraction in total employment and labor force during the Great Recession, it played only a limited role in relieving recessionary pressure.     

A policy model to analyze macroprudential regulations and monetary policy

We construct a small‐open‐economy, new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general‐equilibrium model with real financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. The model incorporates rich interactions between the balance sheets of households, firms and banks, long‐term household and business debt, macroprudential policy instruments and nominal and real rigidities and is calibrated to match dynamics in Canadian macroeconomic and financial data. We study the transmission of monetary policy and financial and real shocks in the model economy and analyze the effectiveness of various policies in simultaneously achieving macroeconomic and financial stability. We find that, in terms of reducing household debt, more targeted tools such as loan‐to‐value regulations are the most effective and least costly, followed by bank capital regulations and monetary policy, respectively.     

贫富差距、债务经济与金融危机——基于资产分布视角的美国金融危机成因探讨

本文从家庭资产分布变化的视角,探讨了近30年来美国社会贫富差距急剧扩大的现象,分析了它的特征、原因和影响,在此基础上讨论了美国的贫富分化、债务经济与金融危机之间的必然联系,以及政府角色定位和政策导向在其中的作用。本文研究有助于深刻认识资产分布两极化的结构特征,为未来我国准确识别居民家庭资产分布变化趋势并采取适时有效的措施提供参考。     

Fiscal policy in a small open economy with cross-border labor mobility

The large and stable inflow of workers’ remittances through formal financial channels to developing countries prompted authorities to harness fiscal resources from this flow. This paper develops a macro-dynamic model of a small open economy with cross-border labor mobility emphasizing fiscal policy. The flow of remittances is the result of a household’s optimizing decision to migrate. We examine the macroeconomic responses to fiscal policies. First, we show that an economy with international migration is more resilient to demand shocks resulting from fiscal contraction. Second, the short-run association between remittances and domestic output depends on the sources of the shocks. Third, our results indicate that the equilibrium impact of a tax on remittances can be expansionary and welfare-improving when an economy is initially close to full employment. The presence of utility-enhancing government expenditure and a potential negative externality from over-allocation of labor abroad (over migration) justify the presence of distortionary taxes.     

The Corporate State,Economic Performance,and Social Policy

We use the Survey of Consumer Finances to analyze changes in U.S. household debt between 1989 and 2013. We focus on how income and debt levels have changed, and what this means for future economic growth and living standards. Prior to the Great Recession, U.S. households had record high debt levels and record low savings rates. Highly leveraged consumption boosted economic growth. However, large debt burdens have led many families to deleverage. Our study finds that deleveraging has been insufficient. Although debt payments have fallen relative to household income, this is mainly due to low interest rates. Debt levels, especially for home mortgages, remain high by historical standards and portend continued stagnation due to lower consumer spending.     

外资非正常撤离的成因、影响及法律对策

2008年金融危机的渐行渐远并没有给全球经济带来恢复的迹象,随之而来的美国与欧洲债务危机又加重了国际经济形势的严峻性。在这种形势下,我国出现的外资非正常撤离潮亦呈现愈演愈烈之势。外资非正常撤离对我国的经济虽不是致命之伤,但却是持续之痛,必须加以重视。根据我国的实际情况,对外资非正常撤离应采取法律对策,从而保证外资非正常撤离的有法可依,追诉可行,降低外资非正常撤离的机率。     

The Influence of Household Financial Debt on Monetary and Exchange Rate Policy: France and Britain compared

The structure of household financial debt may have a major effect on the ability of governments to use monetary policy as a means of influencing exchange rate values. This is illustrated by a discussion of the comparative situation of France and Britain during the 1992–93 ‘crisis’ in the European exchange rate mechanism. The large volume of floating rate household debt in the UK placed a significant limitation on the ability of the UK authorities to use monetary policy. By contrast, the lower volume of mainly fixed rate household debt in France enabled the French authorities to make full use of monetary policy as desired in the pursuit of exchange rate targets. As modern financial markets are highly volatile, governments should take policy measures to create more stable structures of household debt.     

Why Crisis Continue?——The Endogenous Reason of Financial Crisis and Evolution to the Debt Crisis and the Enlightenment

当前欧债危机越演越烈,需要重新思考金融危机爆发并且演化为主权债务危机的内生性根源.此次金融危机中,资本主义社会的基本矛盾是危机发生的制度性根源.这一矛盾外化为“相对过剩”.经济机制层面,新自由主义影响下的自由市场经济体制放大了市场经济固有的缺陷,为危机的爆发积累了机制性原因.微观市场层面,缺乏金融监管、不当的房地产和货币政策则是诱发危机的直接原因.高赤字和高负债的背景下,一些国内经济和社会矛盾突出的国家发生主权债务危机是金融危机深化的必然结果.处理好自由市场经济和规制市场经济、金融创新和金融监管、实体经济和虚拟经济的关系以及地方债务问题是此次金融和债务危机给我国的最大启示.     

Rejoinder to Peltzman

Since 2008, the U.S. economy has been mired in the second worst economic crisis in its history. Conceivably, massive government spending could bring the economy out of this slump as massive war spending ultimately ended the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, a far superior strategy exists: guaranteeing employment accompanied by retraining to enable all unemployed workers to become absorbed into the regular work force. Beyond ending the crisis, the superiority of this strategy is that it would institutionalize a procedure for insuring that, in an increasingly technologically dynamic and open economy, workers would possess the necessary skills for available jobs. Guaranteeing employment would also eliminate the ecological costs associated with the need to seek growth to generate employment at practically any cost. Finally, it would establish a new moral social contract, whereby everyone is granted the dignity that accompanies being a productive member of society. Welfare for those able to work could disappear, along with the degradation and humiliation accompanying it.     

The drivers of household indebtedness reconsidered: An empirical evaluation of competing arguments on the macroeconomic determinants of household indebtedness in OECD countries

Abstract

Household debt is at a record high in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and it played a crucial role in the recent financial crisis. Several arguments on the macroeconomic drivers of household debt have been put forward, and most have been empirically tested, albeit in isolation of each other. This article empirically tests 7 competing hypotheses on the macroeconomic determinants of household indebtedness together in one econometric study. Existing arguments suggest that residential house prices, upward movements in the prices of assets demanded by households, the income share of the top 1%, falling wages, the rolling back of the welfare state, the age structure of the population, and the short-term interest rate drive household indebtedness. We formulate these arguments as hypotheses and test them for a panel of 13 OECD countries over the period 1993–2011 using error correction models. We also investigate whether effects differ in boom and bust phases of the debt and house price cycles. The results show that the most robust macroeconomic determinant of household debt is real residential house prices, and that the phase of the debt and house price cycles plays a role in household debt accumulation.     

欧洲债务危机、财政联盟与蓝色债券

自希腊发生主权债务危机以来,欧元区持续动荡。欧元区总体财政状况并不差于美国等国,但欧元区却率先陷入债务危机困局,未建立统一的财政政策是一个重要原因。在债务危机的逼迫下,欧元区针对危机采取了一系列救助措施,这事实上是某种形式的财政联盟。在对比美欧财政和公共债务状况的基础上,本文探讨了欧元区建立财政联盟的必然性,分析了欧元区财政联盟的实际进展,并进一步剖析了建立财政联盟的一种方案——"蓝色债券"的优点和障碍等。     

量化宽松、财政赤字与美元资产安全

次贷危机爆发以来,美国采取了一系列货币和财政政策以拯救深陷泥潭的本国经济。美联储运用非常规政策工具向金融体系注入大量流动性资产,美联邦政府也大幅度提高了财政支出,使得财政赤字愈加恶化。在此背景下,美元资产的安全性成为投资者关注的焦点。本文分别从货币政策效果、财政赤字的可持续性以及投资主体等方面考察了美元资产的安全性,分析了美国宏观经济政策的实际作用,并从投资主体结构探讨了美国联邦政府的经济取向,最后以所涉及资产的市场表现回应美元资产安全问题。笔者认为,与其它货币资产相比,持有美元资产并不会承担额外的币种风险。     

THE BEHAVIOR OF U.S. PUBLIC DEBT AND DEFICITS DURING THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

In this paper we test the sustainability of U.S. public debt for the period 1916–2012 by analyzing how the primary surplus to gross domestic product (GDP) responds to changes in the debt to GDP ratio in a time‐varying parameter model. Further, we determine the stationarity property of the debt/GDP ratio while accommodating possible breaks in the data caused by wars and economic crisis under both the null and alternative hypotheses of an endogenous unit root test. The results show that the U.S. public debt was sustainable until 2005 when the primary surplus to GDP reacted negatively to the debt/income ratio. This is further exacerbated during the global financial crisis when primary surpluses continued to fall with increased debt, thus jeopardizing the sustainability of fiscal policy. While the stationarity test shows that the U.S. fiscal debt/GDP ratio is sustainable, it fails to highlight the risk that its debt policy has been becoming unsustainable in recent years. (JEL H62, E62, C2)     

地方政府债务理论： 国内外研究比较与国内研究展望

国外地方政府债务的研究伴随着财政联邦主义理论的出现而开始受到学者关注，无论在研究内容，还是在研究方法上，都形成了系统的体系和严密的逻辑。国内地方政府债务研究从21世纪初开始进入学者的视野，并在美国金融危机和欧洲债务危机爆发后成为理论界的热点研究领域。与国外研究相比，国内研究尚未建立起或运用鲜明的逻辑，研究的深度还需加强，研究方法也存在较大差距。基于国内研究的不足与差距，本文提出了国内地方政府债务研究展望，包括债务形成与发展的动态考察，债务规模决定因素的定量研究，债务可持续性分析与融资平台研究，债务管理的制度安排与体系设计。