Informal debt contract and consumption : evidence from the vehicle scrappage program/

This paper evaluate the influence of household heterogeneity on their decisions to take up the vehicle scrappage program (VSP) in China. The presence of debt owed to family and friends (DOFF) on household balance sheet significantly reduces the takeup rate of the cash for clunkers program in China, by approximately 1.57%. Moreover, this effect is stronger among households without a schedule for DOFF repayment, a formal debt contract, or positive interest rate. This suggests that informal finance can have shadow cost due to informal debt's potential recall risk, and non-pecuniary costs in the forms of social sanction. Moreover, I exploit a unique rebate mechanism of the VSP in China to show that the program design and household liquidity together play a big role in determining the take-up rate of the vehicle scrappage program.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Lu, Fangzhou. Ph. D. Sloan School of Management

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan Parker.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115650

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/115650