Journal of Credit Risk

Risk.net

Consumer credit card payment dynamics over the economic cycle

Christopher H. Wheeler

  • The extent to which consumers carry balances on their credit cards strongly influences the incidence of default they exhibit.
  • Using monthly data on consumer credit cards from 2008 to 2018, we show that variation in economic conditions is associated with “procyclical” changes in consumer payment behavior, whereby the incidence and extent of revolving increase, while transacting and inactivity decrease, as conditions worsen.
  • The estimated effects of economic fluctuations, however, tend to be small in magnitude, amounting to roughly half the size of typical seasonal movements in payment behavior.
  • Most of consumer payment behavior, rather, is driven by payer type, which tends to be strongly persistent over time.

The frequency and degree to which consumers revolve credit card debt is a key driver of default risk on their accounts. Given the considerable discretion cardholders possess with respect to how they pay down their debt, we investigate the nature of payment behaviors and extent to which these vary with the business cycle. Using data on 1.8 million credit card accounts observed between 2008 and 2015, we find that although the state of the macroeconomy, as captured by various labor and housing market indicators, shows (in line with intuition) that recessionary periods are associated with more (and a higher degree of) revolving and less transacting/inactivity, the estimated magnitudes of these effects are extremely small. Indeed, they are roughly half the average magnitude of the seasonal effects we estimate from a set of month indicators. By far the most important predictor of future payment behavior is past behavior, suggesting that for the purposes of credit risk modeling and estimation, credit card holders can be segmented into relatively stable payer-type categories based on recent behavior.

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