An overview of consumer data and credit reporting

By R. Avery, P. Calem, Glenn B. Canner. 2003

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For some time, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has sought to obtain more detailed and timely information on the debt status, loan payment behavior, and overall credit quality of U.S. consumers. For decades, information of this type has been gathered by credit reporting companies primarily to assist creditors in evaluating the credit quality of current and prospective customers. To evaluate the potential usefulness of these data, the Federal Reserve Board engaged one of the three national consumer reporting companies to supply the credit records, without personal identifying information, of a nationally representative sample of individuals. This article describes the way the credit reporting companies compile and report their data and gives background on the regulatory structure governing these activities. This description is followed by a detailed look at the information collected in credit reports. Key aspects of the data that may be incomplete, duplicative, or ambiguous as they apply to credit evaluation are highlighted in the analysis. The article concludes with a discussion of steps that might be taken to address some of the issues identified. ; Also identified as FRB Philadelphia Payment Cards Center Discussion Paper 03-03

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66755d8506c01c68e672b72811b55f944cce5c48

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

An Introduction to the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (2010, unknown): “According to Avery et al (2003), the latter group of non currently reporting accounts, with positive balances when last reported, accounted for approximately 8% of all credit accounts in their sample.”
Measuring student debt and its performance (2014, background): “1 See Avery et al. (2003) for a detailed discussion of the contents, sources, and quality of credit report data.”
Emergence of Financial Intermediaries in Electronic Markets: The Case of Online P2P Lending (2009, unknown): “The informational value of these quantitative figures should be considered high, although the degree to which consumer credit reports are accurate, complete or consistent is in dispute (Avery et al., 2003).”
Consumer Credit Scoring: Do Situational Circumstances Matter? (2004, methodology): “For our analysis, we rely on a sample of credit files from a national credit reporting agency obtained by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (see Avery et al (2003)).”
Present-Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing (2009, unknown): “The credit reports list detailed information on each individual’s credit behavior, like outstanding balances and available credit limits (for details on credit reporting, see Avery et al., 2003).”
Bad Credit, No Problem? Credit and Labor Market Consequences of Bad Credit Reports (2020, background): “See Avery et al. (2003) and Lee and der Klaauw (2010) for additional details. We make three sample restrictions to the CCP data. First, we restrict the sample to individuals who filed for bankruptcy protection between 1995 and 2004. This restriction allows us to observe credit outcomes both before a”