Henrik Yde Andersen

Interest-only mortgages (IOMs) were popular before the 2007-2008 financial crisis, e.g. in the US and UK, and remain common in a few countries today, including the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. We use Danish administrative data, covering all mortgage loans originated between 2010 and 2019, to compare savings and spending of IOM borrowers to that of non-IOM borrowers using their mortgage origination year in an event study design. Conditional on time and individual fixed effects, we show that homeowners aged 50 and above increased spending in connection with taking out an IOM, while homeowners below this age predominantly accelerated non-mortgage debt repayments. 

We have estimated a new measure of pension wealth gains, covering the working-age population in Denmark during 2015-2022, in collaboration with Statistics Denmark. By linking this new data to the existing income and tax registers at the individual level, we provide a full picture of net financial wealth gains across the age distribution. This lays out the basis for further analysis, e.g., of the impact of monetary policy on net capital gains in Danish households. The data can be accessed through Statistics Denmark’s research data portal.