As you can imagine, the panel has been a great resource, accessible by staff at all Federal Reserve banks through a fast and easy-to-use interface. It has already been used in several 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Federal Reserve Board and Treasury reports, Federal Open Market Committee presentations, speeches, and congressional testimonies, and in about 100 research papers and policy analyses. It also has value for our community outreach, as we can profile specific geographical regions. Particularly impactful have been our releases of the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, containing a comprehensive summary of households’ access to and use of credit. Several of our research findings have influenced policy debates. For example, an important question regarding recent household deleveraging has been to what extent the decline in aggregate household debt was attributable to delinquent debt charge-offs as opposed to active debt paydowns by consumers. Our research found that while charge-offs played an important role, a huge change in consumer behavior had taken place. While consumers extracted home equity and took on more debt during 2007, they reverted to actively paying down debt during 2009, creating a remarkable $ billion reversal in cash flow available for consumption in just two years. In our most recent report we are seeing signs suggesting that the deleveraging period has reached its end. The availability of borrower-level data has been key to our ability to analyze consumer behavior.
The first challenge is what we might think of as data innovation, and the second is data stewardship. With data innovation, the big challenge is to use our imagination and to think hard about what data may be able to say about a particular problem. This includes both novel uses of existing  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  data as well as the collection of new data. To illustrate what I mean by this, let me describe one effort, among many, here at the New York Fed. Consumer Credit Panel I’ll describe our Consumer Credit Panel, which we created in 2010. At the onset of the financial crisis, it became apparent that our knowledge of the liability side of household balance sheets was inadequate. At that time, the main data sources on consumer debt consisted of loan-level data sets on specific categories of loans, such as mortgages, as well as aggregated data on household sector debt from the Board of Governors’ Flow of Funds statistical release. While providing a useful aggregate overview of household debt, the Flow of Funds release defines the household sector as a residual sector that also includes nonprofit organizations, such as schools, hospitals and churches, as well as hedge funds and private equity funds. Furthermore, the overview it provides is limited to outstanding balances and lacks important information on the origination, repayment, and delinquency status of household debt.