The HFCS data document that debt participation and debt holdings vary substantially across countries, and seem to be related to institutional settings, such as the length of repossession periods, as again documented in the report on the HFCS (HFCN (2013)).
This implies that the dynamics of aggregate spending and output vary across countries, depending not only on the size of shocks and their distribution across households, but also on the institutional settings, which may have affected the accumulation of debt and house price dynamics to a varying extent before the crisis. 1  See Carroll et al. (2013).