Funding Self-Employment – The Role of Consumer Credit

This article investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – in particular, instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and nonfinancial household variables, we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kneiding, Christoph, Kritikos, Alexander S.
Language:en_US
Published: Taylor and Francis 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13344
Description
Summary:This article investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – in particular, instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and nonfinancial household variables, we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. When analysing the correlation between consumer loan take-ups and consumption of self-employed in comparison to employee households, we find first evidence that overdrafts are used by self-employed to finance their business as well. This indicates that intermingling constitutes a financing strategy when regular business loans might not be accessible.