IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29386.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Consumption Smoothing or Consumption Binging? The effects of government-led consumer credit expansion in Brazil

Author

Listed:
  • Gabriel Garber
  • Atif R. Mian
  • Jacopo Ponticelli
  • Amir Sufi

Abstract

Brazil initiated a major credit expansion program through government banks in 2011. The program primarily targeted public sector workers with offers of payroll-backed loans. Using individual-level administrative data we find that the program led to a 15 percentage point rise in debt to initial income for public sector workers. We develop a new method for estimating workers' expected income growth, and show that ''consumption smoothing'' cannot explain the rise in consumer borrowing. Instead, the evidence supports ''consumption binging'': less financially sophisticated workers borrowed more at high real interest rates, and experienced both higher consumption volatility and lower average consumption.

Suggested Citation

  • Gabriel Garber & Atif R. Mian & Jacopo Ponticelli & Amir Sufi, 2021. "Consumption Smoothing or Consumption Binging? The effects of government-led consumer credit expansion in Brazil," NBER Working Papers 29386, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29386
    Note: CF DEV IFM POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29386.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Berkowitz, 2022. "Rational but Not Prescient: Borrowing during the Fracking Boom," Working Paper 7314, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G53 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Financial Literacy
    • O16 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29386. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.