Household leverage, re-leveraging and spending behaviour

有两个因素使得房价走势对消费支出和更广泛的经济尤为重要。首先，它代表了家庭财富的很大比例。根据英国国家统计局的数据，在英国，房地产占家庭总可销售净财富的四分之三。第二个因素是杠杆。绝大多数英国家庭用巨额信贷购买了第一套住房，导致家庭总资产和净资产头寸之间存在巨大差异。在标准抵押贷款合同下，家庭的负债不会随着房价的涨跌而变化，这意味着对于杠杆家庭来说，价格变动可能会导致家庭的住房净财富发生重大变化。因此，杠杆可能会放大经济冲击对家庭整体资产负债表的影响，对他们的消费意愿以及获得信贷的可能性产生潜在的重要影响。在拟议的研究中，我们将提供新的实证证据，说明英国家庭在房价上涨和下跌期间调整杠杆的程度，以及杠杆如何影响消费者支出决策，以应对住房财富的变化。我们还将研究，如果在危机前引入不同的宏观审慎政策，消费者在衰退期间可能会采取什么行动。我们的经验战略既需要详细而全面的支出微观数据，也需要家庭资产负债表数据。由于英国不存在包含这一信息的单一大型数据集，我们将使用两样本方法将ESRC的二级数据集理解协会/英国家庭小组调查和英国国家统计局的生活成本和食品调查中包含的现有信息结合起来。我们的研究将分三个阶段进行。在第一阶段，我们将调查家庭可能在多大程度上重新杠杆化(去杠杆化)以应对房价上涨(下跌)。当房价上涨时，家庭贷款与价值比率将机械地下降，从而降低家庭投资组合的风险和回报。家庭可以接受杠杆率的降低，也可以通过积极增加借款来抵消这一影响。我们将实证检验家庭的反应，以调查英国积极再杠杆化的程度。在第二阶段，我们不仅将调查更多杠杆化家庭是否因房价上涨而增加支出，而且还将调查他们如何调整支出。后一个问题需要使用生活成本和食品调查。后一个问题很重要，因为正如我们在我们的支持案例中所讨论的那样，重要的是检验围绕杠杆可能放大房价变化影响的机制的各种假设。我们的方法将考虑到这样一个事实，即杠杆是一个选择变量，它可能与其他混杂变量相关。在研究的第三阶段，我们将应用我们的发现，对政府政策提出建设性建议，特别关注旨在防止家庭杠杆率过度增长的宏观审慎政策的设计。要做到这一点，我们不仅将借鉴上述工作的经验发现，还将通过消费者行为的动态结构模型，研究消费者对具体宏观审慎政策的反应。该模型的构建将使我们能够模拟消费者对不同政策制度的反应，并直接量化其潜在影响。例如，这将包括评估对贷款与价值和贷款与收入比率的限制对消费者支出和福利的相对影响。该项目的这一最后部分将借鉴调查人员在这类模型的方案编制、估算和校准方面的一些深厚经验。

Two factors make movements in house prices especially important for consumption spending and the wider economy. The first is that it represents a significant proportion of households' wealth.According to the ONS, in the UK, property accounts for three quarters of households' aggregate marketable net wealth. The second factor is leverage. The vast majority of UK households purchase their first home with substantial credit, leading to a large difference between households gross and net asset positions. Under standard mortgage contracts households' liabilities do not change as house prices rises and fall, meaning that for leveraged households, price movements can lead to significant changes in a households' net housing wealth. As a result, leverage can magnify the effects of economic shocks on households' overall balance sheets, with potentially important implications for their willingness to spend as well as their access to credit.In the proposed research, we will provide new empirical evidence on the extent to which UK households adjusted their leverage over periods of rising and falling house prices, as well as on how leverage affects consumer spending decisions in the response to changes in their housing wealth. We will also examine how consumers may have acted over the period of the recession had different macro-prudential policies been introduced pre-crisis. Our empirical strategy requires both detailed and comprehensive spending micro-data and data on household balance sheets. Since no single, large dataset containing this information exists in the UK, we will combine available information contained in the ESRC's secondary dataset Understanding Society/the British Household Panel Survey and the ONS's Living Costs and Food Survey using two-sample methods.Our research will proceed through three stages. In the first stage, we will investigate the degree to which households' may have re-leveraged (de-leveraged) in response to house price increases (falls). When house prices rise, household loan to value ratios will mechanically fall, reducing the risk and return on household portfolios. Households may either accept this reduction in their leverage, or they may act to counteract it by actively increasing their borrowing. We will empirically examine household responses to investigate the extent of active re-leveraging in the UK.In the second stage, we will not only investigate whether more leveraged households increase their spending by more in response to house price increases, but also how they adjust their spending. This latter question requires use of the Living Costs and Food Survey. This latter question is important because, as we discuss in our Case for Support, it is important for testing various hypotheses around the mechanisms through which leverage may amplify the effect of house price changes. Our approach will allow for the fact that leverage is a choice variable that is potentially correlated with other confounding variables. In the third stage of our research we will apply our findings to make constructive recommendations about government policy, paying particular attention to the design of macro-prudential policies aimed at preventing excessive leverage growth among households. To do this we will not only draw on our empirical findings from the work set out above, but also examine the response of consumers to specific macro-prudential policies through a dynamic structural model of consumer behaviour. The construction of this model would allow us to simulate the responses of consumers to different policy regimes and directly quantify their potential impact. This would include for example an assessment of the relative impacts of restrictions on loan-to-value and loan-to-income ratios on consumer spending and welfare. This final part of the project would draw on some of the investigators' deep experience in the programming, estimation and calibration of such models.