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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".