金融素养与家庭负债——基于中国居民家庭微观调查数据的分析

本文运用清华大学中国金融研究中心2010年和2011年中国消费金融现状及投资者教育调查数据,考察了金融素养对家庭负债决策的影响。研究发现:绝大多数居民家庭对贷款产品不了解,金融素养普遍较低;教育程度与金融素养存在正相关关系;男性的金融素养高于女性的金融素养。实证研究还发现:金融素养高的居民家庭更可能持有负债和偏好通过正规渠道借贷,但金融素养的提高有助于减少过度负债。本文的政策含义在于:首先,应客观认识当前绝大多数中国居民家庭金融素养比较低的现实及其在微观层面对过度借贷的影响;其次,开展金融教育应因人而异,因为金融素养在不同年龄、性别和教育程度的人群中存在明显的异质性;最后,任何涉及到居民家庭的金融政策(如养老保险的改革、普惠金融的推进等)都不应忽视金融素养的影响。     

Household Debt and Financial Constraints in Australia

Over the past decade, household debt (as a share of household income) has reached historically high levels. This has raised concerns about whether, as a result of the rise in debt, households are now more financially ‘fragile'. Using household survey data, a logit model is constructed to examine the relationship between the probability of being financially constrained and the economic and demographic characteristics of households in Australia. We find that the probability of a household being constrained is significantly affected by demographic and economic variables such as age, home ownership, weekly household income, and the share of income going to repayments on mortgage debt. Comparing survey results across time, it appears that the overall proportion of households that are financially constrained has fallen or, at worst, remained unchanged between 1994 and 2001. Much of the rise in debt appears to have been due to unconstrained households taking on more debt. As such, the rise in the aggregate debt to income ratio associated with owner‐occupier mortgages appears to be the result of voluntary household choice and not to be associated with an increase in household financial distress.     

Household Debt and Credit: Economic Issues and Data Problems

We survey contributions to the analysis of household liabilities, highlighting relevant theoretical aspects and outlining how data sources may support empirical testing and measurement efforts. Specifically, we classify aspects of household debt, discussing the theoretical and policy relevance of heterogeneity across individual and country dimensions. Aiming to illustrate conceptual and measurement issues, we refer to the approaches and results of some recent relevant country-specific work on administrative and survey data, and we argue that research in this area would greatly benefit from availability of appropriately classified household liabilities data and of cross-country institutional information.     

中国家庭债务和资产积累关系的实证分析:1997-2008

笔者运用1997年～2008年中国家庭债务和家庭资产积累的时间序列数据,定量分析了家庭负债和家庭资产积累的关系。研究发现,家庭债务和家庭资产积累存在同向的长期均衡关系,家庭债务的变动会影响家庭资产的积累。笔者提出促进家庭资产合理配置和防范中国家庭债务快速增长带来的消极后果的相关建议,旨在为决策部门制定合理的经济政策提供参考。     

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 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.     

Debt Overhang and Deleveraging in the US Household Sector: Gauging the Impact on Consumption

Using a novel data set for the U.S. states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of U.S. consumption since 2007 in the aftermath of the housing bubble. By separating the concepts of deleveraging and debt overhang—a flow and a stock effect—we find that excessive indebtedness exerted a meaningful drag on consumption over and beyond wealth and income effects. The overall effect, however, is modest—‐around one sixth of the slowdown in consumption between 2000–06 and 2007–12—and mostly driven by states with particularly large imbalances in their household sector. This might be indicative of non‐linearities, whereby indebtedness begins to bite only when misalignments from sustainable debt dynamics become excessive.     

Household Debt,Dynamic Stability,and Change in Demand Creation Patterns

This paper examines dynamic stability and demand creation patterns of an economy in the context of the augmentation of household debt. First, we investigate the dynamic characteristics specific to an economy with household borrowing. Second, we reveal how demand creation and economic growth pattern change with the introduction of households' active borrowing. Our results shows that it is more favorable for the stability of an economy to politically control the interest rate on lending rather than to leave it to be determined by private financial institutions. Our results also indicate that even if the demand regime is wage-led, paradoxically, a rise in wage share may not necessarily stimulate economic growth. On the other hand, profit-led growth is more likely.     

家庭债务变动与居民消费的过度敏感性:来自中国的证据

通过引入家庭债务变量对LC-PIH模型进行扩展,并运用动态最小二乘(DOLS)方法、误差修正模型、暂时性-持久性因子分解和脉冲响应进行实证分析。实证结果表明:家庭债务、收入和财富的持久性变动对消费存在显著的促进效应,收入的持久性变动影响最大,财富和家庭债务次之;不同于传统分析框架结论,不但财富的持久性变动会影响消费,而且其暂时性变动也会影响消费,但收入的暂时性变动对消费影响并不显著;在家庭债务和财富的持久性和暂时性变动共同作用下,消费变动更为剧烈。     

Odious Debt in an Imperfect World

The odious debt problem refers to a government's ability to borrow for elite consumption while the general population repays. Although an intuitive response is to ban lending to such regimes, this paper shows that if a government faces endogenous replacement risk, then an international odious debt doctrine which (i) decreases the country's debt ceiling; (ii) decreases the likelihood that the citizens must repay the debt; or (iii) increases the government's cost of borrowing for a given default risk can all decrease citizens' welfare. These findings suggest that, even when a regime is clearly odious, allowing it to borrow up to a point may be preferable to a complete lending ban.     

Debt markets and corporate debt structure in an emerging market: The South African example

This is a first attempt at gauging the effects of corporate public debt issuance on the debt structure, risk profile and valuation of firms in an emerging market. We find that financial services firms, along with government institutions, are important early supporters of an organized public debt market. Firms in this market use equity, public debt and private debt funds simultaneously as need be. Consistent with predictions of the corporate debt structure literature, public debt-issuing firms are larger, older, more profitable, and less informational opaque than non-public debt-issuing firms. Moreover, public debt-issuing firms experience significant reductions in both overall and systematic risks, and incur lower cost of capital following issuance than non-public debt issuers. These and other findings of the study suggest deepening national debt markets can be a fruitful financial market development exercise for emerging markets.     

Debt Policy Rules in an Open Economy

In a small open economy model of endogenous growth with public capital accumulation, we examine the effects of a debt policy rule under which the government must reduce its debt–GDP ratio if it exceeds the criterion level. To sustain public debt at a finite level, the government should adjust public spending rather than the income tax rate. The long‐run debt–GDP ratio should be kept sufficiently low to avoid equilibrium indeterminacy. Under sustainability and determinacy, a tighter (looser) debt rule brings welfare gains when the world interest rate is relatively high (low).     

The Optimal Level of Debt in an OLG Model with Endogenous Fertility

Abstract. In the present work we extend Diamond's OLG model by allowing for endogenous fertility and look at the consequences of such an extension on the rules for optimal public debt issuing. In particular, we show that the condition according to which the rate of growth of population should be higher than the interest rate is no longer sufficient for obtaining welfare improvements via debt increases and that the level of optimal debt is, ceteris paribus, lower than the one arising with exogenous fertility. Finally, a sensitivity analysis shows that the optimal level of debt is higher the lower the capital share, the higher individuals' degree of patience, the bigger the child‐rearing cost and the lower the preference for children. On policy grounds we argue that debt‐tightening policies may be optimal in the long run provided that the cost of rearing children does not increase (or, if anything, does decrease).     

The Russian Crisis: A Debt Perspective

On 17 August 1998 the Russian authorities devalued the ruble, suspended repayments of ruble-denominated government paper and announced a moratorium on the Russian foreign debt. By doing so the government brought the domestic banking sector to the edge of bankruptcy and risked losing the little international faith still remaining in its abilities to restructure the economy. In this article we examine the deeper causes of the crisis. After having analysed its antecedents we gather our new insights into a basic stylised model of the crisis. The outcome of the model is then linked to the actual data and events.     

Debt ownership structure and legal system: an international analysis

This paper is concerned with the ownership structure of corporate debt from an institutional perspective. An attempt is made to identify the factors affecting bank debt use from an international sample of companies from Austria, Germany, Japan, Belgium, France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden and the USA. The results show that bank debt depends both on factors specific to each company and on institutional features of each country. More exactly, it is found that bank loans are related to firm size, to the quality and risk of the projects, and to the collateral. It is also found that a number of legal-institutional factors are impacting on the source of firms’ debt, such as creditor protection, firm disclosure requirements and law enforcement.     

The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy

Most intellectuals would be pleased to have one major debate named after them. The Marxist economic historian Robert Brenner has managed the remarkable feat of unleashing two significant intellectual controversies. The first, in the historical journal Past & Present during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was provoked by his interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. More recently, however, Brenner has switched his attention from the longue durée of European history to the economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In a massive journal-length article published in New Left Review in 1998 he offered a comparative analysis of the three major Western economies—the USA, Japan and Germany—from 1945 onwards, tracing the development of a protracted crisis of profitability that, Brenner contended, explained the ‘long downturn’ experienced by global capitalism since the early 1970s.     

Household behavior and individual autonomy: an extended Lindahl mechanism

We present a comprehensive model of household economic decision covering both full cooperation and noncooperation as well as semi-cooperative cases, varying with income distribution and a parameter vector $\theta $ representing degrees of individual autonomy with respect to the public goods. In this model, the concept of “household $\theta $ -equilibrium” is introduced through the reformulation of the Lindahl equilibrium for Nash implementation and its extension to semi-cooperation. Existence is proved and some generic properties derived. An example is given to illustrate. An important benefit of this approach is to allow for a compact and unified investigation of the testable (local) restrictions of household demand. A particular decomposition of the pseudo-Slutsky matrix is derived and the testability of the various models discussed.     

Debt contracts with ex-ante and ex-post asymmetric information: an example

Summary. We consider a simple model of lending and borrowing combining two informational problems: adverse selection and costly state verification. Our analysis highlights the interaction between these two informational problems. We notably show that the higher the monitoring cost, the less discriminating the optimal menu of contracts is.Received: 24 September 2004, Revised: 5 April 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C7, D8, G3.L. Renou: Correspondence toWe thank Anne Villamil for insightful comments.