Charge-offs, Defaults and the Financial Accelerator

Abstract U.S. banks countercyclically vary the ratio of charge-offs to defaulted loans (COD) and the standard deviation of COD is roughly 15 times that of GDP. We show that canonical financial accelerator models cannot explain these facts, but introducing stochastic default costs and stochastic risk can potentially resolve the discrepancy. Estimating the augmented model and including both surprise and news shocks reveals that default cost news …