University of Heidelberg Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 676 How Do Income and the Debt Position of Households Propagate Public into Private Spending? Sebastian K. Rüth and Camilla Simon February 2020 How Do Income and the Debt Position of Households Propagate Public into Private Spending? Sebastian K. R¨uth Camilla Simon∗ February 21, 2020 Abstract We study the household sector's post-tax income and debt position as prop- agation mechanisms of public into private spending, in postwar U.S. data. In structural VARs, we obtain the consumption \crowding-in puzzle" for surges in public spending and show this consumption response to be accompanied by a persistent increase in disposable income. Endogenously reacting income, however, is insufficient to rationalize conditional comovement of private and public spending: once we hypothetically force (dis)aggregate measures of in- come to their pre-shock paths, consumption still rises. Corroborating these findings within an external-instruments-identified VAR, which constitutes an adequate laboratory for the simultaneous interplay of financial and macroe- conomic time-series, we provide causal evidence of fiscal stimulus prompting households to take on more credit. This favorable debt cycle is paralleled by dropping interest rates, narrowing credit spreads, and inflating collat- eral prices, e.g., real estate prices, suggesting that softening borrowing con- straints support the accumulation of debt and help rationalizing the absence of crowding-out. Keywords: Government spending shock, household income, household in- debtedness, credit spread, external instrument, fiscal foresight. JEL codes: E30, E62, G51, H31. ∗Respectively: Heidelberg University, Alfred-Weber-Institute for Economics, phone: +49 6221 54 2943, e-mail:
[email protected] (corresponding author); University of W¨urzburg,Department of Economics, phone: +49 931 31 85036, e-mail: camilla.simon@uni- wuerzburg.de.