The recent literature has shown that income inequality is one of the main causes of borrowing and debt accumulation by working households. This paper explores the possibility that household indebtedness is an important cause of rising income inequality. If workers experience rising debt burdens,...

The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a marked contraction in US consumption spending that had hitherto been boosted by historically high levels of household debt-financing. These events question the validity of conventional models of consumption based on the life-cycle...

Neoliberalism eviscerated the value-sharing ethos of the post-war Golden Age (1945-73), seeking to maintain social cohesion in civil society by 'managing the discontent of the losers'. This involved reconciling working households to the realities of the neoliberal labour market by means of...

We extend the principles of the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) to the household sector by re-framing the three financial postures associated with the FIH (hedge, speculative, and Ponzi) in the context of households, using a simple model of household borrowing and debt-financing behavior....