期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2014
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of thedifferences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional onhousehold characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, theamount of debt held and, in the case of secured debt, the interest rate paid on the main mortgage.Second, we examine the role of legal and economic institutions in accounting for these differences. We usedata from the first wave of a new survey of household finances, the Household Finance and ConsumptionSurvey, to achieve these aims. We find that the patterns of secured and unsecured debt outcomes varymarkedly across countries. Among all the institutions considered, the length of asset repossession periodsbest accounts for the features of the distribution of secured debt. In countries with longer repossessionperiods, the fraction of people who borrow is smaller, the youngest group of households borrow loweramounts (conditional on borrowing), and the mortgage interest rates paid by low-income households arehigher. Regulatory loan-to-value ratios, the taxation of mortgages and the prevalence of interest-only orfixed-rate mortgages deliver less robust results.
关键词：Household debt and interest rate distributions; Time to Foreclose; Taxation; Loan-to-;Value ratios; Fixed rate mortgages; Financial literacy.
