Analytics & Society
Take It to the Limit? The Effects of Household Leverage Caps
Credit: Felix Zeiffer
Author(s):
Sjoerd Van Bekkum, Marc Gabarro, Rustom M. Irani, Jose-Luis Peydro
Cooperation Partners:
Chair of Corporate Finance
Description:
We analyze the effects of borrower-based macroprudential policy at the household-level. For identification, we exploit administrative Dutch tax-return and property ownership data linked to the universe of housing transactions, and the introduction of a mortgage loan-to-value limit. The regulation reduces mortgage leverage, with bunching in its limit. Ex-ante more-affected households substantially reduce overall leverage and debt servicing costs but consume greater liquidity to satisfy the regulation. Improvements in household solvency result in less financial distress and, given negative idiosyncratic shocks, better liquidity management. However, fewer households transition from renting into ownership. All of these effects are stronger for liquidity-constrained households.
“Helpful or Harmful? Negative Behavior Toward Newcomers and Welfare in Online Communities
Credit: Anna Logue
Author(s):
Florian Pethig, Kai-Lung Hui, Andreas Lanz, Hartmut Höhle
Cooperation Partners:
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HEC Paris
Description:
New members are important for the survival of online communities. However, hostility toward newcomers is pronounced in many online communities, often exercised through downvotes, rejections, and negative comments from established members. Online communities have realized that such negativity can take a toll on newcomers. In this paper, we study a new intervention aimed at reducing hostility toward newcomers: a “newcomer nudge,” which informs members when they are interacting with a newcomer post and nudges them to be more lenient toward its author. We use a natural experiment research design and analyze 5,027 newcomer posts published in a 90-day time window before and after the introduction of the nudge. We observe a strong increase in upvotes and number of responses as well as a decrease in negative sentiment in the responses. Taking advantage of the panel data, we find that newcomers who are socialized with the nudge are significantly more likely to post again in the following 12 months than newcomers socialized without the nudge.