IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v27y2014i5p1404-1433..html

Household Debt and Social Interactions

Author

Listed:
  • Dimitris Georgarakos
  • Michael Haliassos
  • Giacomo Pasini

Abstract

Can concern with relative standing, which has been shown to influence consumption and labor supply, also increase borrowing and the likelihood of financial distress? We find that perceived peer income contributes to debt and the likelihood of financial distress among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers. We use unique responses describing perceived peer characteristics from a Dutch population-wide survey to handle two major challenges of uncovering social interaction effects on borrowing: (1) debts, unlike conspicuous consumption, are often hidden from peers and (1) location is missing in anonymized data. We employ several approaches to uncover exogenous, rather than correlated, effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Dimitris Georgarakos & Michael Haliassos & Giacomo Pasini, 2014. "Household Debt and Social Interactions," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(5), pages 1404-1433.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:27:y:2014:i:5:p:1404-1433.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhu014
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions

    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:oup:rfinst:v:27:y:2014:i:5:p:1404-1433.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.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.