Sustainable Household Debt: Towards an Operational View and Framework

From a broad financial stability perspective, sustainable household debt should be evaluated within a steady-state consumption-path approach. We calculate measures for households' steady-state consumption based on average consumption to income ratios for a number of household groups and use a 'counterfactual history approach' to evaluate their debt sustainability. The results show that households within the first-home buyers and second steppers groups, which hold more than half of total household debt in Norway, are vulnerable to an increase in the loan rate.