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Working Paper
Forecasting credit card portfolio losses in the Great Recession: a study in model risk
Credit card portfolios represent a significant component of the balance sheets of the largest US banks. The charge?off rate in this asset class increased drastically during the Great Recession. The recent economic downturn offers a unique opportunity to analyze the performance of credit risk models applied to credit card portfolios under conditions of economic stress. Specifically, we evaluate three potential sources of model risk: model specification, sample selection, and stress scenario selection. Our analysis indicates that model specifications that incorporate interactions between policy ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and Auto Loan Origination Trends
We study the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on auto loan origination activity during 2020. We focus on the dynamic impact of the crisis across lending channels, Equifax Risk Score (Risk Score) segments, and relevant geographic characteristics such as urbanization rate. We measure a significant drop in auto loan originations in March‒April followed by a near rebound in May‒June. Originations remain slightly depressed until October and fall again in November‒December. We document the largest drop and the smallest rebound in the subprime segment. We do not find any suggestive evidence that ...
Working Paper
CECL Implementation and Model Risk in Uncertain Times: An Application to Consumer Finance
I examine the challenges of economic forecasting and model misspecification errors confronted by financial institutions implementing the novel current expected credit loss (CECL) allowance methodology and its impact on model risk and bias in CECL projections. We document the increased sensitivity to model and macroeconomic forecasting error of the CECL framework with respect to the incurred loss framework that it replaces. An empirical application illustrates how to leverage simple machine learning (ML) strategies and statistical principles in the design of a nimble and flexible CECL modeling ...
Discussion Paper
Climate Change and Consumer Finance: A Very Brief Literature Review
Extant research shows that climate change can impose significant costs on consumers’ wealth and finances. Both sea-level rise and flooding from hurricane events led to high price declines and thus wealth loss for homes in coastal areas or in disaster-struck areas, with effects lingering for a number of years in some cases. In terms of consumer finance, while the average consumer is not always significantly negatively affected by a disaster, the vulnerable groups (those with low credit scores and who are low income) can be severely affected, experiencing higher rates of delinquencies and ...
Working Paper
From Incurred Loss to Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL): A Forensic Analysis of the Allowance for Loan Losses in Unconditionally Cancelable Credit Card Portfolios
The Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) framework represents a new approach for calculating the allowance for credit losses. Credit cards are the most common form of revolving consumer credit and are likely to present conceptual and modeling challenges during CECL implementation. We look back at nine years of account-level credit card data, starting with 2008, over a time period encompassing the bulk of the Great Recession as well as several years of economic recovery. We analyze the performance of the CECL framework under plausible assumptions about allocations of future payments to existing ...
Report
Summary of the Workshop on Credit Card Lending and Payments
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Supervisory Research Forum (SURF) and Consumer Finance Institute (CFI) held the virtual Workshop on Credit Card Lending and Payments on September 16‒17, 2020. The workshop included sessions on payment systems and financial innovation, the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on consumer finance and credit use, and the industry impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). This summary offers highlights of keynote speakers, academic paper presentations, and discussion panels.
Working Paper
From Incurred Loss to Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL): Forensic Analysis of the Allowance for Loan Losses in nconditionally Cancelable Credit Card Portfolios
The Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) framework represents a new approach for calculating the allowance for credit losses. Credit cards are the most common form of revolving consumer credit and are likely to present conceptual and modeling challenges during CECL implementation. We look back at nine years of account level credit card data, starting with 2008, over a time period encompassing the bulk of the Great Recession as well as several years of economic recovery. We analyze the performance of the CECL framework under plausible assumptions about allocations of future payments to existing ...
Working Paper
Can We Take the “Stress” Out of Stress Testing? Applications of Generalized Structural Equation Modeling to Consumer Finance
Financial firms, and banks in particular, rely heavily on complex suites of interrelated statistical models in their risk management and business reporting infrastructures. Statistical model infrastructures are often developed using a piecemeal approach to model building, in which different components are developed and validated separately. This type of modeling framework has significant limitations at each stage of the model management life cycle, from development and documentation to validation, production, and redevelopment. We propose an empirical framework, spurred by recent developments ...
Working Paper
Credit risk analysis of credit card portfolios under economic stress conditions
We develop an empirical framework for the credit risk analysis of a generic portfolio of revolving credit accounts and apply it to analyze a representative panel data set of credit card accounts from a credit bureau. These data cover the period of the most recent deep recession and provide the opportunity to analyze the performance of such a portfolio under significant economic stress conditions. We consider a traditional framework for the analysis of credit risk where the probability of default (PD), loss given default (LGD), and exposure at default (EAD) are explicitly considered. The ...
Working Paper
ENDOGENOUS/EXOGENOUS SEGMENTATION IN THE A-IRB FRAMEWORK AND THE PRO-CYCLICALITY OF CAPITAL: AN APPLICATION TO MORTGAGE PORTFOLIOS
This paper investigates the pro-cyclicality of capital in the advanced internal ratings-based (A-IRB) Basel approach for retail portfolios and identifies the fundamental assumptions required for stable A-IRB risk weights over the economic cycle. Specifically, it distinguishes between endogenous and exogenous segmentation risk drivers and, through application to a portfolio of first mortgages, shows that risk weights remain stable over the economic cycle when the segmentation scheme is derived using exogenous risk drivers, while segmentation schemes that include endogenous risk drivers are ...