"A statistically and economically significant negative correlation with growth"

Again, from The real effects of debt (PDF, 39 pages) by Stephen G Cecchetti, M S Mohanty and Fabrizio Zampolli (page 10):

Looking at the details, we see that both non-financial corporate and household debt display a statistically and economically significant negative correlation with growth. For corporate debt, a 1 percentage point increase is associated with an approximately 2 basis point reduction in per capita GDP growth. For household debt, the impact is even larger: a 1 percentage point rise in household debt-to-GDP is associated with a 2½ basis point reduction in growth...

For the record, their data evaluates "government, non-financial corporate and household debt in 18 OECD countries from 1980 to 2010." They find private sector debt negatively correlated with economic growth. They report no such finding for public debt.

I have shown that increases in debt are associated with declines in growth, as their PDF does. But I have found also that decreases in debt are associated with improvement in growth.

I am happy with the results from the PDF. Oddly, however, Cecchetti et al append this confession:

These results are somewhat surprising, as we do not believe that debt in the generally low range found in our sample is uniformly bad for growth.

I would be more comfortable with their result if they simply said they were interested to see what the relation is, between debt and growth. Instead of approaching the question with preconceived notions.