Analysis of Stress Level of Korean Household Members due to Household Debt

Korean household debt is one of the main sources of the current financial crisis. This paper studies the impact of household members' attributes such as a type of housing(self-own or rent), education, age, average monthly income of the head of household, and the area of residence, on the stress level of the household members due to household debt. We analyze a real data set collected by KB Kookmin Bank in 2004. We consider low and high stress level as a binary response variable and use a logistic regression model with the attributes of household members as explanatory variables. A simple but well-fitting model is selected by backward elimination method based on the likelihood statistic for goodness-of-fit test, and the impact of the attributes on the stress level is studied from parameter estimates of the selected model. We also perform the similar analysis on a binary response variable which distinguishes households with no debt from the rest. From the analysis, the stress level tends to be low for households with self-own houses, high average monthly income, low education level, and young members.