---
title: "Household debt when rates rise (research idea)"
description: "Household debt and borrowing appear on 53 recent papers in the economics and finance journals, but only 9 of them carry an interest-rate, tightening, variable-rate or refinancing keyword. The 2022–2024 rate rises hit households with floating-rate mortgages hard in some countries and barely at all in others. Where did consumption fall, and did defaults follow?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/household-debt-when-rates-rise
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/household-debt-when-rates-rise.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Household debt when rates rise (research idea): Household debt and borrowing appear on 53 recent papers in the economics and finance journals, but only 9 of them carry an interest-rate, tightening, variable-rate or refinancing keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["economics", "finance", "households"]
keywords: ["household debt", "household borrowing"]
---

# Household debt when rates rise

Household debt and borrowing appear on 53 recent papers in the economics and finance journals, but only 9 of them carry an interest-rate, tightening, variable-rate or refinancing keyword. The 2022–2024 rate rises hit households with floating-rate mortgages hard in some countries and barely at all in others. Where did consumption fall, and did defaults follow?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 53 papers carry a household-debt, household-borrowing, household-leverage or mortgage-debt keyword (29 in economics journals, 24 in finance): "household debt" on 32, "household borrowing" on 11, "household leverage" on 7. Only 9 of them also carry an interest-rate, rate-hike, monetary-tightening, variable-rate, adjustable or refinancing keyword.

## Questions

- In countries with mostly floating-rate mortgages (Australia, Sweden, the UK), how much did consumption fall per point of rate increase, compared with fixed-rate countries (the US, France)?
- Did households that had refinanced at low fixed rates stop moving house, and what did that do to labour mobility?
- Did arrears rise where expected, or did savings built up in the pandemic absorb the shock?

## Data that could help

Loan-level mortgage data with rate types, household spending from bank transaction data, and arrears statistics by country.

## Next step

Compare quarterly consumption growth across countries by their share of floating-rate mortgages during the 2022–2024 tightening.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| household debt | 1 | #2881 | 2, 4, 0, 1, 1, 3, 5, 4, 2, 3, 4, 0, 0, 5, 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 3, 0, 2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 0, 3, 0, 1, 1, 5, 4, 2, 4, 1, 1 | 83 |
| household borrowing | 1 | #2881 | 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 1 | 25 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Household debt when rates rise. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/household-debt-when-rates-rise

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-household-debt-when-rates-rise,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Household debt when rates rise},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/household-debt-when-rates-rise}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).