Where Is the Missing Credit Card Debt?
The Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has published a new Discussion Paper titled "Where Is the Missing Credit Card Debt? - Clues and Implications" 
by Jonathan Zinman, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a visiting scholar with the Payment Cards Center.
The paper makes a casual comparison of industry and household data sets which suggests that households underreport credit card borrowing by a factor of three. This paper offers some reassurance and several new stylized facts. Accounting for differences in definitions between household and industry measures reduces debt underreporting to a factor of two. Underreporting is less severe for general-purpose than for other cards. The true underreporting factor has remained stable over the past 15 years, even as 26 million households entered the market. Households report charges and account holding relatively accurately.
How can you know for sure if the numbers are skewed
Posted by: Steve | October 09, 2007 at 11:17 AM