This paper reassesses whether household credit operates as a debt-led stabilizer of consumption under Kaleckian mark-up pricing. A compact Kaleckian-Minskyan framework links administered prices to real-wage compression, distributional pressure, credit-financed consumption and financial fragility. Using annual World Development Indicators data for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, the paper constructs real consumption, private-credit and distributional proxies and estimates two-way fixed-effects, country-specific HAC and IV-style robustness specifications. The evidence is sharp but cautious: real GDP growth is the only robust driver of consumption growth in the full panel, while lagged credit growth and distributional proxies are not statistically stable. Spain shows a country-specific debt effect. Debt-led demand stabilization is therefore institutionally contingent, not a uniform Eurozone mechanism.
Keywords: Kaleckian pricing; household debt; income distribution; consumption smoothing; financial fragility; Eurozone; dynamic panel data
JEL classification: E12 E21 E25 E31 E44
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