No. 319 - Over-indebtedness in Italy: how widespread and persistent is it?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the measures of over-indebtedness proposed in the literature and to apply them to the Italian case from 2008 to 2014 by using the wide array of information available from the Bank of Italy’s survey on households. The numerous measures of over-indebtedness are critically analysed from both a cross-sectional and a historical perspective. The panel also enables us to analyse the transition into and out of over-indebtedness. Moreover, by using the Eurosystem’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), we can compare the over-indebtedness of Italian households with that of other euro-area countries. The paper also addresses the issue of the measurement errors that could bias both the level of over-indebtedness and estimates of the transition into and out of it.