Martin Flodén
July 2014
http://martinfloden.net

The file hhdebt_reproduce.zip contains data and code to reproduce the analysis in:

• Should We Be Concerned by High Household Debt?, a text published at http://ekonomistas.se on February 20, 2014
• Did Household Debt Matter in the Great Recession?, supplementary material to the blog post mentioned above.

To reproduce the graphs and the regression results, run the Stata script ekonomistas.do. This script reads data from the Excel file Data.xlsx. You may need to install Stata's package for the code to run (type "ssc install estout, replace" at the command prompt). The scatterplot reported in the blog post will be generated as the file eFIG6en.wmf when you run the Stata code.

To reconstruct the Data.xlsx file, run the Matlab script main.m. It calls the scripts GetDataEO94.m and GetDataBIS.m. GetDataEO94.m is a script that reads the OECD’s Economic Outlook database (you must download this on your own, see below). The other data files used by the Matlab scripts are: OECD_EO_HousePrices.xlsx, OECD_FinancialIndicators.xlsx, and BIS_HousePricesDec2013.xlsx. To download the Economic Outlook database, go to the OECD Economic Outlook No. 94 page, choose the "Export" tab and then "Related files". Download the .csv file, import to Excel, and save as eo94.xlsx.