Impute mortgage and consumer debt from the Wealth and Assets Survey#426
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Impute mortgage and consumer debt from the Wealth and Assets Survey#426MaxGhenis wants to merge 2 commits into
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Adds mortgage_debt (gross outstanding household mortgage, WAS HMortGR8) and consumer_debt (non-mortgage, non-student-loan borrowing) to the wealth imputation targets. These are the first liabilities the dataset carries, so a net wealth measure (total_wealth minus debt) can finally go negative for households whose debts exceed their assets, instead of bottoming out at a £0 point mass of asset-poor households. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
WAS does not itemise credit cards, overdrafts, hire purchase or arrears on the household file, so total_loans_exc_slc (formal loans only) captured barely a third of non-mortgage debt: GBP 1,138 across 11% of households. Define consumer_debt instead as the gap between gross financial wealth and financial wealth netted of all liabilities except student loans (HFINWR8 - HFINWNTR8_exSLC) - GBP 2,917 across 47% of households, covering all unsecured non-student debt. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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What
Imputes two household liabilities from the Wealth and Assets Survey (Round 8) alongside the existing wealth components:
mortgage_debt— gross outstanding household mortgage debt (WASHMortGR8; ~30% of households, ~£44k mean).consumer_debt— non-mortgage, non-student-loan borrowing (personal loans, credit, hire purchase).Both are clipped at zero on write (a liability cannot be negative).
Why
total_wealthis gross (property + corporate + savings) with no liabilities netted out, so it can never be negative. The bottom of the wealth distribution is therefore an artefact — ~13% of households own nothing and sit at exactly £0, leaving the lowest wealth decile empty. With mortgage and consumer debt imputed, a companion policyengine-uk PR adds anet_wealthvariable that goes negative for genuinely underwater households, putting them at the bottom of the distribution where they belong.Notes
uk_land_debt(already in the rename map) turned out to be a tiny residual land-debt category (0.2% of households); the real mortgage measure isHMortGR8, which this PR uses.