Why do households participate in the loan moratorium in Hungary? Theoretical and empirical considerations

In order to mitigate the economic effects from the COVID-19 epidemic, a moratorium on loan repayments was introduced in several countries, including Hungary. Essentially, a loan moratorium provides additional finance for participants, allowing theories of both credit demand and consumption to be tested on debtors’ decisions as to whether or not they participate in the programme. In this paper, we use a linear probability model on the Hungarian survey data to examine the driving factors behind the households’ decision to participate in the scheme. Our results show that the younger debtors and those with more children are more likely to utilise the programme. Stretched financial situations, i.e., lower incomes, lower savings and higher payment-to-income ratios, increase the probability of continued participation as well. The chance of participating in the scheme also increases significantly when a household has faced borrowing constraints over the past two years, i.e., it has not been or only partially been able to satisfy its credit demand.

HOUSING CHOICES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSUMPTION HETEROGENEITY

This paper proposes a model to jointly explain two stylized facts observed in the recent empirical literature—the existence of a significant size of wealthy hand-to-mouth consumers and negative marginal propensities to consume associated with housing upgrades. The key ingredients of the model are a realistic set of housing choices, sizable down payment requirements, transaction costs, and endogenous borrowing constraints. Moreover, in the presence of unanticipated income shocks, this richness in marginal propensities to consume has significant implications for aggregate consumption and helps explain the puzzling increase in savings by low net worth households observed during the Great Recession as well as the consumption responses to recent tax rebates.

COVID-19 may trigger an ideological shift over decades

Significance Research by Thomas Piketty shows that a form of free-market ideology has been a key driver of rising income inequality since the 1980s. The airing of alternative ideas, the challenge of decarbonising economies and the potential for the COVID-19 crisis to reset politics raise the prospect of a paradigm shift. Impacts In much of the global South, borrowing constraints and obstacles to taxing the wealthy will make redistribution harder. Strengthening democratic institutions may be as important as strengthening pro-equity political parties to advance redistributive agendas. Political parties in OECD nations have focused on ‘identity’ issues since the 1980s; COVID-19 is bringing redistribution back to the fore.

Optimal Taxation with Private Insurance

We derive a fully nonlinear optimal income tax schedule in the presence of private insurance. We fill the gap in the literature by studying the optimal tax formula with a comprehensive structure of the private markets—including incomplete markets models— both theoretically and quantitatively. As in the standard taxation literature without private insurance (e.g., Saez (2001)), the optimal tax formula can still be expressed in terms of standard sufficient statistics. With private insurance, however, the formula involves additional terms that reflect how the private market interacts with public insurance. For example, the optimal tax formula should also consider asset distribution and pecuniary externalities as well as the welfare effects of borrowing constraints.

Dynamic Asset Pricing with Interactions between Short-Sale and Borrowing Constraints

This paper studies the joint effect of borrowing and short-sale constraints under heterogeneous beliefs and risk aversions. Although the constraints never simultaneously bind in equilibrium, interesting economics emerge in the anticipatory effects of potentially future binding constraints. In particular, the risk-free rate and Sharpe ratio experience endogenous jumps at a critical state, where two equilibria coexist. Moreover, a short-sale ban can lead to a lower stock price and higher volatility depending on the relative tightness between the constraints, and tightening the borrowing constraint during a short-sale ban can also make returns more volatile.