Household Debt and Social Interactions
研究发现，认为自己比同龄人更穷的人，因担心相对地位而增加借贷，进而更可能陷入财务困境。该研究利用荷兰全国调查数据，解决了债务隐蔽性和位置信息缺失两大难题，以识别社会互动对借贷的外生影响。
Can concern with relative standing, which has been shown to influence consumption and labor supply, also increase borrowing and the likelihood of financial distress? We find that perceived peer income contributes to debt and the likelihood of financial distress among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers. We use unique responses describing perceived peer characteristics from a Dutch population-wide survey to handle\ntwo major challenges of uncovering social interaction effects on borrowing: (1) debts, unlike conspicuous consumption, are often hidden from peers and (2) location is missing in anonymized data. We employ several approaches to uncover exogenous, rather than correlated, effects.