Job polarisation decreases the access to credit in Europe

The last few decades have been accompanied by disruptive changes to the structure of employment, which have led to deterioration in demand for middle-skill occupations, a process known as job polarisation. As the demand for middle-skill workers shrinks, expectations about households’ income through their lifetime horizon are adjusted. It is unclear whether these expectations can loop back into the credit system, and affect the lending behaviour of credit institutions, or whether this process impacts on the households’ self-assessment of their opportunities to borrow money. In this paper, we study how the process of job polarisation affects credit demand and supply, studying its relationship with credit constraint and credit quality.