On the association of debt attitudes with socioeconomic characteristics and financial behaviors

Abstract

This study investigates time trends in debt attitudes, the socioeconomic profiles of members in three debt attitudes groups, implications for borrowing, banking, and spending behaviors, and the relationship of debt attitudes with planned borrowing and saving behaviors. Based on a representative online survey data of the German population, gender, income, and educational attainment are found to distinguish a larger group of emergency debtors from two smaller, about equally‐sized, groups of debt refusers and debt pragmatists. Debt refusers report less engagement in current borrowing, banking, and spending behaviors compared with emergency debtors and debt pragmatists. Results hold after controlling for psychological responses such as economic outlook, financial planning, and debt stress. Implications for attitude‐focused interventions are discussed.

Self-control and debt decisions relationship: evidence for different credit options

“…Namely, Wang et al (2011) ascertained that attitudes and, more specifically, dimensions of attitudes differently influence individuals' behaviour towards credit cards or other types of debt. Loibl et al (2021) show that the type of attitude towards debt also influences how individuals behave towards the use or non-use of revolving credit. The underlying argument here is that different types of debt involve different levels of difficulty in both access to credit and repayment conditions.…”

Drivers and consequences of borrowers' voluntary privacy information disclosure—Evidence from a Chinese online consumer financing platform

“…Existing research has investigated primarily the role of mandated information disclosure and audited financial reports used to aid lenders' decision-making process and to predict the likelihood of loan defaults. Typical mandated disclosure involves borrowers' objective information such as gender, age, race, marital status, financial strength, and educational background (Herzenstein et al, 2008;Loibl et al, 2021;Pope & Sydnor, 2011). Other studies have examined the role of unverifiable and voluntary disclosures such as peers' creditworthiness (Iyer et al, 2016), loan purpose (Michels, 2012), and descriptive information about borrowing usage (Netzer et al, 2019;Yao et al, 2019) as well as social media information (Ge et al, 2017).…”