D14 - Personal Finance
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The Effect of Mortgage Rate Resets on Debt: Evidence from TransUnion (Part I)
This note studies how decreases in mortgage rates affect the behaviour of borrowers in terms of spending on durable goods and repaying debt. -
Flight from Safety: How a Change to the Deposit Insurance Limit Affects Households’ Portfolio Allocation
Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper. -
Inequality in Parental Transfers, Borrowing Constraints and Optimal Higher Education Subsidies
This paper studies optimal education subsidies when parental transfers are unequally distributed across students and cannot be publicly observed. After documenting substantial inequality in parental transfers among US college students with similar family resources, I examine its implications for how the education subsidy should vary with schooling level and family resources to minimize inefficiencies generated by borrowing constraints. -
A Look Inside the Box: Combining Aggregate and Marginal Distributions to Identify Joint Distributions
This paper proposes a method for estimating the joint distribution of two or more variables when only their marginal distributions and the distribution of their aggregates are observed. Nonparametric identification is achieved by modelling dependence using a latent common-factor structure. -
A Barometer of Canadian Financial System Vulnerabilities
This note presents a composite indicator of Canadian financial system vulnerabilities—the Vulnerabilities Barometer. It aims to complement the Bank of Canada’s vulnerabilities assessment by adding a quantitative and synthesized perspective to the more granular (distributional) analysis presented in the Financial System Review. -
November 28, 2017
Analysis of Household Vulnerabilities Using Loan-Level Mortgage Data
This report examines detailed data on home mortgages to provide a better understanding of the vulnerabilities associated with the mortgage market. The proportion of low-ratio mortgages is growing, particularly in regions with strong house price growth. Moreover, these borrowers exhibit less flexibility to adverse shocks, since they have high debt levels relative to income and have taken mortgages with long amortization periods. -
Adoption Costs of Financial Innovation: Evidence from Italian ATM Cards
The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household’s exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost. -
Household Risk Assessment Model
Household debt can be an important source of vulnerability to the financial system. This technical report describes the Household Risk Assessment Model (HRAM) that has been developed at the Bank of Canada to stress test household balance sheets at the individual level. -
The Impact of Macroprudential Housing Finance Tools in Canada: 2005–10
This paper combines loan-level administrative data with household-level survey data to analyze the impact of recent macroprudential policy changes in Canada using a microsimulation model of mortgage demand of first-time homebuyers. -
Financial Inclusion—What’s it Worth?
The paper studies the determinants of being unbanked in the euro area and the United States as well as the effects of being unbanked on wealth accumulation. Based on household-level data from The Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey and the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances, it first documents that there are, respectively, 3.6 per cent and 7.5 per cent of unbanked households in the two economies.