Summary:
In China's current development stage with its new development dynamic, household consumption plays a prominent role in economic development and is essential for unleashing the potential of the domestic market and promoting the development of the Chinese economy. The literature demonstrates that consumer credit and a wider range of moderate household indebtedness have intertemporal and wealth effects on consumption, which allow household consumption to stay on the optimal route under the persistent income hypothesis and then promote household consumption by exploiting the effect of leverage.However, the household sector has bewildering phenomenon that rising debt level and weak consumption growth coexist at present in recent years.Thus it is worth checking out that the probability of household financial distress caused by overdraft effect and debt repayment risk due to mounting debts will constrain consumption.Therefore, given the high risk of household sector indebtedness in China, it is important to further investigate the effect of rising leverage on household consumption from the perspective of potential household financial distress. This paper explores whether and how leverage affects household consumption behavior by introducing household financial fragility. This paper constructs an intertemporal optimal consumption decision-making model that considers household financial fragility and identifies how the rising household debt level influences this fragility, resulting in heterogeneous household consumption behavior, and testify the relations among household leverage, financial fragility and household consumption heterogeneity with the China Household Financial Survey data 2015 and 2017.The results show that higher leverage increases household financial fragility, which results in deviation from the optimal intertemporal consumption by weakening the ability to smooth consumption and strengthening the budget constraint of consumption, and thus household consumption exhibits the features of “high marginal propensity to consume, low level of consumption expenditure”. This paper further respectively analyzes whether the effects of household leverage on consumption has a clear difference in debt structures and consumption structures, and between urban and rural areas.The results show that for households that invest in more than one residence, higher leverage significantly increases their financial fragility under uncertainty shocks and has a greater negative effect on consumption. Private loans from relatives provide a relatively flexible mechanism to meet obligations, and therefore weaken the negative impact of leverage on household consumption through the financial fragility channel. The financial fragility caused by the increase in leverage has a greater negative effect on consumption expenditure on durable goods. Moreover, given the differences in consumption between urban and rural households, The household financial fragility due to the rising leverage hasgreater crowding-out effect on rural households than on urban households. The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows. First, this study emphasizes that financial fragility is the key factor in understanding the relationship between household leverage and consumption decisions. It shows that leverage affects household consumption through financial fragility by weakening the ability of smoothing intertemporal consumption and intensifying household budget constraints.. It also demonstrates how household leverage influences consumption behavior, and thus explains the rationale behind the high marginal propensity to consume and the low levels of consumption expenditure in the household sector. Thus, this paper supplements the relevant literature on the effect of household debt accumulation on consumption expenditure. Second, this paper measures household financial fragility by the financial margin of unpredictable expenditure under uncertainty shocks; estimates the marginal propensity to consume function and logarithmic consumption expenditure function; and demonstrates how financial fragility affects consumption when household leverage rises. This provides empirical evidence of the dynamic effect of household debt accumulation on consumption behavior. Third, the theoretical analysis and empirical evidence help to explain the coexistence of the rapid increase in household leverage and the slow growth of household consumption expenditure and clarify that policymakers should comprehensively consider the impact of household leverage on consumption and potential financial risks when designing financial policies to promote consumption. The paper has important policy implications for promoting supply-side reform, serving the real economy, and guarding against systemic financial risk.
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