A number of social theorists have argued that debt is now the determining economic and thus social relation, superseding relations of production or consumption as the socially formative economic dynamic. And debt plays a hegemonizing function. Credit and debt have been written into what I have...

We examine the impact of overdue debts in small villages in one of Hungary's most disadvantaged regions. We find that a significant number of debtors with overdue debts permanently escape from debt collectors. Accordingly, in our sample, overdue debts reduce the likelihood of declared work by 14...