this post authored by William J. Arnesen, Jacob Conway, and Matthew Plosser
Since the depths of the Great Recession, household debt has increased from a low of $11 trillion in 2013 to more than $14 trillion in 2020 (see the New York Fed Household Debt and Credit Report). In this post, we examine how consumers’ repayment priorities have evolved over that time.
Specifically, we seek to answer the following question: When consumers repay some but not all of their loans, which types do they choose to keep paying and which do they fall behind on?
We use data from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel to construct a “head-to-head conflict among different types of debt. In other words, if a consumer chooses to repay all of their auto loans, while defaulting on their consumer debt, that would constitute a “win for auto loans over consumer debt. We then run a logistic regression to predict the overall strength of each debt type, focusing on three categories: auto loans, mort