가계부채가 자산 불평등에 미치는 영향

초록

Excessive household debts may lead to household defaults and undermine the soundness of financial institutions. Being concerned over this financial instability associated with household debts, financial regulators tend to use various measures to restrict excessive household debts.The macroprudential policy on household debts, however, can affect decisions on asset purchase by households, especially purchase of house. The effect of household debt regulation on house purchase differs across households; thus, it may affect wealth inequality.This study analyzes the effects of household debt on wealth inequality. In particular, this study focuses on the asset purchase channel and distinguishes between two cases: household debts associated with asset purchase and without it. Whereas regulations on household debts have been studied from a macroprudential persepctive in most cases, this study takes a distinct view and analyzes the effect on wealth inequality.To this end, this study employs the recentered influence function (RIF) method. We use the RIF regression to directly estimate the effect of household debt on net wealth inequality measure. We use the Gini coefficient as wealth inequality measure. In addition, we use quantiles of wealth distribution for our analysis. This study uses the Korean Labor Panel Survey (KLIPS) data, ranging from 1990 to 2022. The KLIPS data allow us to use relatively long-ranged information on household debt, income, wealth, and other characteristics for our analysis.Main findings from the analysis are as follows: Household debt growth tends to increase the wealth inequality measured by the Gini coefficient. It also tends to decrease wealth by a greater margin but by a lower ratio to wealth level as wealth level becomes higher. Therefore, both facts can be consistent each other.By contrast, household debt growth tends to decrease wealth inequality when it is associated with house purchase. The result implies the existence of the house purchase channel, through which household debt can affect wealth inequality. Furthermore, the effect of household debt on net wealth growth through the house purchase channel is the greatest in the middle household of the net wealth distribution. This distributional difference in the effect of household debt on net wealth growth is consistent with the result that household debt growth associated with house purchase tends to decrease wealth inequality.This result largely holds even after controlling for the imposition of household debt regulation. While the house purchase channel strongly holds over a medium horizon of 3 years. it does not over a longer horizon. It may attribute to the fact that the effects of other factors become greater and tend to attenuate the effect of the house purchase channel as horizon gets longer.Similar to the case of household debt growth, the increase of DSR and LTV tends to decrease (increase) wealth inequality when they are (not) associated with house purchase.

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