PurposeThis paper seeks to measure and characterise the extent of consumer over‐indebtedness among the European Union (EU) member states.Design/methodology/approachThe study evaluates alternative measures of over‐indebtedness on the basis of the permanent‐income/life‐cycle theories of consumption behaviour and adopts a subjective approach in identifying over‐indebted households on the basis of European household survey data. It then investigates the main characteristics of over‐indebted households.FindingsThe empirical results reveal that over‐indebtedness was a significant problem across EU member states in the mid‐1990s. Moreover, an inverse relationship emerged between the extent of the over‐indebtedness problem and the extent of consumer borrowing across EU countries.Research limitations/implicationsAnecdotal evidence seemed to suggest that some main factors behind over‐indebtedness could be “market failure” on the credit market, the existence of liquidity constraints and lack of access to formal credit markets. However, a comprehensive and rigorous investigation of the extent and determinants of over‐indebtedness can only be achieved through analysis of more extended household data sets, particularly panel data.Practical implicationsThe EU credit markets exhibited certain symptoms of “market failure”, on the one hand, and there was also need for further financial liberalisation in the Southern European countries, on the other hand.Originality/valueThe paper provides a first systematic evaluation of existing measures of consumer over‐indebtedness as well as the first EU‐wide empirical investigation of the problem. It should provide valuable information to the credit industry as well as financial regulatory bodies.

In this paper we present a methodology for the study of multi-dimensional aspects of poverty and deprivation. The conventional poor/non-poor dichotomy is replaced by defining poverty as a matter of degree, determined by the place of the individual in the income distribution. The fuzzy poverty measure proposed is in fact also expressible in terms of the generalised Gini measure. The same methodology facilitates the inclusion of other dimensions of deprivation into the analysis: by appropriately weighting indicators of deprivation to reflect their dispersion and correlation, we can construct measures of non-monetary deprivation in its various dimensions. These indicators illuminate the extent to which purely monetary indicators are insufficient in themselves in capturing the prevalence of deprivation. An important contribution of the paper is to identify rules for the aggregation of fuzzy sets appropriate for the study of poverty and deprivation. In particular, we define a ‘composite’ fuzzy set operator which takes into account whether the sets being aggregated are of a ‘similar’ or a ‘dissimilar’ type. These rules allow us to meaningfully combine income and the diverse non-income deprivation indices at the micro-level and construct what we have termed ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ indicators of deprivation. We note that mathematically the same approach can be carried over to the study of persistence of poverty and deprivation over time

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Though there is a considerable literature concerned with the economic consequences of marital breakdown, there is still substantial disagreement in terms of its magnitude. One of the major problems underlying this debate is how economic well-being is defined. In this work we implement several measures of well-being of monetary and multidimensional nature using data from the European Community Household Panel. Another issue in this literature concerns selection bias of divorcing couples. We tackle this issue using a propensity score matching technique combined with a Difference-in-Differences estimator. Results confirm the importance of well-being definition. We find a strong gender bias when using monetary measures but a considerably lower one, and for some countries non existent, when using nonmonetary indices. [Word count: 115]