Sources of Inaction in Household Finance: Evidence from the Danish Mortgage Market

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological costs inhibiting refinancing until incentives are sufficiently strong; and behavior, potentially attributable to information-gathering costs, lowering the probability of household refinancing per unit time at any incentive. We estimate the model on administrative panel data from Denmark, where mortgage refinancing without cash-out is unconstrained. Middle-aged and wealthy households act as if they have high psychological refinancing costs; but older, poorer, and less-educated households refinance with lower probability irrespective of incentives, thereby achieving lower savings. We use the model to understand frictions in the mortgage channel of monetary policy transmission.