Household Debt And Marital Satisfaction

In recent years,the debt ratio of Chinese households has grown at an alarming rate.Chinese per capita disposable income increased by 42% from 2014 to 2018,while total household debt increased by 230% during the same period.A large number of studies have evaluated the macroeconomic consequences of the rapid increase in household debt from the perspectives of labor mobility,consumption,and employment.But few studies have focused on the impact of debt on family life itself.Obviously,the increased debt of Chinese households is largely used for household expenditures,especially for house purchases.This requires us to evaluate the impact of the increase in household debt on people’s welfare from a broader perspective.This paper starts from the perspective of marriage satisfaction and quantitatively examines the impact of increasing family debt on people’s welfare.The family is the basic unit of society.Since Becker(1981),the level of family welfare has always been the focus of economic research.A large number of studies analyze the factors that affect marriage satisfaction from individual factors such as age at first marriage,appearance,etc.,but there are few literatures that penetrate from the economic level.The few literatures discussing family financial problems and marital satisfaction,most of them discuss the correlation between family debt,income and marital satisfaction,and few studies have conducted rigorous causal identification.We use the CFPS panel data from 2014 and 2018 to quantitatively analyze four issues.(1)The impact of assets and liabilities on marriage satisfaction.(2)The impact of family financial problems on different dimensions of marriage satisfaction.(3)The differential impact of mortgage and consumer debt on marriage satisfaction.(4)The transmission mechanism between family finances and marriage satisfaction.The results showed that OLS regression overestimated the impact of family financial problems on marriage satisfaction.After controlling for individual fixed effects,this article finds(1)Family debt reduces individual marital satisfaction,which is mainly reflected in male observations.(2)Satisfaction with spouse’s economic contribution and satisfaction with spouse’s housework contribution are two important dimensions of marriage satisfaction,and family financial problems have no significant impact on them.(3)The family debt is divided into mortgage and non-mortgage debt.The former has an insignificant negative effect on marriage satisfaction,while the latter significantly deteriorates marriage satisfaction.(4)The loan is divided into bank-loan and private lending.The former has an insignificant negative effect on marriage satisfaction,while the latter significantly reduce marriage satisfaction.(5)The increase in family debt deteriorates personal health,increases the frequency of couples using the Internet,and reduces the time they spend together,which in turn leads to a decline in individual marriage satisfaction.This article proposes policy recommendations on maintaining family stability and social harmony from the perspective of family finance.(1)The government has increased the scientific popularization of family financial knowledge to promote the formation of a social ecology of benign financial exchanges between husband and wife.(2)Provide married individuals with more standardized borrowing channels in terms of non-mortgage liabilities.Provide more suitable non-mortgage loans for married families.(3)Provide more convenient medical insurance services for married individuals with high debts,and ensure personal repayment as much as possible while maintaining good health.