消费信贷的决定因素【外文翻译】

外文翻译

原文

The Determinants of Consumer Credit Material Source: Source: Consumer Credit in Europe—Risks and opportunities of a Damnic Industryy

Author:Daniela Vandone

1 Introduction

The literature of consumer credit is sizeable. Such a body of work reflects not only the composite nature of unsecured debt, but also the fact that different methodological approaches exist depending on the research questions under analysis and the objectives sought.

Four main approaches can be seen: a management approach, which focuses on the characteristics of the credit industry, its workings and the policies adopted by supply-side players; a legal approach, which investigates the impact the regulatory framework has on competition and consumer protection; a socio-psychological approach, which analyses how individuals are affected by consumption behavior and indebtedness choices; an economic approach, which for the most part concentrates on the determinants of the demand for and supply of consumer credit and on an analysis of the characteristics of individuals and households in debt.

In this chapter we will discuss the economic approach with the aim of providing an outline of the individual and institutional factors that are considered in the literature as determinants of consumer credit, its diffusion and distribution amongst different segments of the population.

The economic models referred to are based on the economic rationality of individuals, who seek to increase living standards by smoothing consumption over different periods of their lives through saving and borrowing decisions. According to these models, consumer credit demand and supply is determined by individual factors, i.e. socio-demographic and economic factors, as well as by institutional factors, i.e. the institutional context in which borrowers and lenders are placed.

These studies, which first appeared in the second half of the twentieth century, have been flanked in recent years by work in behavioral economics, which focuses

instead on th e psychological variables that influence an individual’s behavior and which have revealed that this behavior is at odds with the rational choices posited by traditional economic models.

The analysis of the literature offered here, rather than attempting to represent an exhaustive summary of empirical estimations and economic models used by the authors of the various works cited, more modestly aims to provide a basis for specific investigations into the diffusion of consumer credit in Europe, the nature of the consumer credit industry, the causes of over-indebtedness and the most appropriate policy responses to the problem.

2 The Life-Cycle and Permanent Income Theories

The theoretical economic framework for consumption, saving and indebtedness decisions developed within the Life-Cycle theory, developed by Modigliani and Brumberg 1954, and the Permanent Income Hypothesis, proposed by Friedman in 1957.（1）

The central idea of these inter-temporal consumption choice models is that households make their consumption choices (and consequently those relating to saving and indebtedness) on the basis of their wealth, current disposable income and future income expectations so as to guarantee a uniform level of consumption over their lifetimes.

The underlying assumption of these models is that income is generally low in an individual’s early working life and tends to rise towards retirement. Individuals at the start of their working life, expecting higher future income receipts, finance the purchase of assets in order to raise consumption over the level offered by current income. Nearing the end of their working lives, inversely, individuals raise savings levels in preparation for retirement when spending will be greater than earnings. Within this framework, saving and indebtedness guarantee heightened economic welfare by smoothing out consumption over time.

In the ‘‘standard theory’’, named as such by Modigliani himself, the economic model posits that choices regarding households’ consumption levels over different periods of their life are subject to an inter-temporal budget constraint. Consequently, they may decide in a certain year to spend more than available income by running down all or part of their assets and/or by borrowing, provided that such a solution is temporary and that they die solvent.（2）

Considerable further empirical analyses of the theory have stressed the need for the standard model to take into account two additional aspects (Ando and