The Impact of Housing Credit on Personal Bankruptcy Sumit Agarwal† and Changcheng Song‡ Dec 2015 Abstract We use a linked housing transaction dataset and a personal bankruptcy dataset to study the impact of housing credit on personal bankruptcy in Singapore. Using a difference-in- differences (DD) approach, we find that an increase in housing credit increases the monthly instalment by 460-800 Singapore dollar, and increases the likelihood of personal bankruptcy by 0.15-0.22 percentage points for house buyers who have more exposure to the housing credit increase. To investigate the mechanisms, we show that the observed effect is unlikely to be driven by composition and selection of irresponsible buyers. The effect is mainly due to the increasing debt burden. JEL Classification: D14, R30, E51 Keywords: Personal Bankruptcy, Housing Market, Housing Credit Policy, Loan-to-Value Ratio, Household Finance, Real Estate __________________________________________________________________________________ ∗ We benefited from the comments of Chris Carroll, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Tullio Jappelli, David Laibson, Jessica Pan, Jonathan Parker, Ivan Png, Nagpurnanand Prabhala, Tarun Ramadorai, David Reeb, Amit Seru, Nick Souleles, Bernard Yeung, and seminar participants at the National University of Singapore. All errors are our own. †Departments of Finance and Real Estate, National University of Singapore, BIZ1-07-69, Mochtar Raidy Building, 15 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore, 119245, Singapore (email:
[email protected]) ‡ Department of Economics, National University of Singapore, 1 Arts Link, AS2 05-37, Singapore, 117570, Singapore (email:
[email protected]) 1 I. Introduction What is the impact of housing credit on house buyers? Standard economic theory suggests that housing credit can facilitate consumption-smoothing for house buyers.