Playing with Fire? Household Debt near Retirement in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because retired households cannot quickly adjust to shocks, for example by working more, they represent a vulnerable group when credit conditions deteriorate. We analyze the evolution of debt among households nearing retirement in Canada over the period 1999–2016. First, we find that debt as a ratio of income has risen considerably over that period, and debt as a fraction of assets has also doubled, even though assets remain roughly five times as large as debt. Second, we report that mortgage debt has risen the most but that average mortgage payments have remained relatively constant over the period as a result of the downward trend in borrowing costs. Compared with the United States, Canada has a higher share of highly indebted individuals, and they use home equity lines of credit more extensively than their US counterparts. Finally, we find that a small but significant fraction of households are playing with fire, being vulnerable to a sudden rise in borrowing costs or a meltdown of house prices that could jeopardize their standard of living in retirement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".