Jordan

Household Attitudes towards debt & risk taking after financial crises 🔗

• First impression

  • Interesting topic, but you provide very little motivation
  • Some of the motivation that you provide is theoretical (which is good), but also try to contrast the theoretical findings with the available literature (e.g. consumption smoothing, how does this theory perform empirically)
  • You might even connect debt levels to the housing market (Netherlands good anecdote - but so is e.g. Germany, Berlin)

• Data

  • You might use the survey in combination with regional-level data about the intensity of the crisis
  • e.g. region-wide unemployment increase in the crisis years
  • Available from Eurostat I think

• Methodology

  • Survey waves
  • Be more detailed in the description of the data!
  • Does the data contain various waves (before/after) fin. crisis?
  • Does it also contain location?
  • If so, then you can exploit the difference in intensity of financial crisis on changing household behavior in various regions.
    • Some regions (and individuals within) experienced large shocks, others relatively small
    • Does the behavior of the individuals who exp. large shocks change more than the small shock?
    • Approach: fixed effects panel data on the regional level (for example)
    • Other approach: event study for different waves, also between hard-hit and not-so-hard-hit regions
    • These designs are a kind of diff-in-differences design, so you should also be able to retrieve the data to show parallel trends, to convince the reader that the variation in intensity of the crisis was quasi-random

• In sum: if the survey is sufficiently detailed enough and runs over time / place, I think it is a good candidate to answer these questions. This gives you the freedom to be flexible in your approach.