Asymmetric Effects of Private Debt on Income Growth

Abstract This paper uses a panel vector autoregressive model to study the differential effects of components of private debt on income growth for a large panel of countries. While household debt growth in a given period generally has a positive impact on income, this effect is much stronger for countries with relatively lower levels of income and household debt-to-GDP ratios. On the other hand, the responsiveness of income growth to an increase in corporate debt varies across countries, with a consistently negative impact in richer and/or more heavily indebted countries. A simple extension of our framework suggests the roles of investment and consumption spending in explaining the varying effects of household and corporate debt on growth. We carry out several exercises to illustrate the robustness of our results.