Exposure at default modeling – A theoretical and empirical assessment of estimation approaches and parameter choice

Estimating the credit risk parameter exposure at default is important for banks from an internal risk management and a regulatory perspective. Several approaches are common in the literature and in practice. We theoretically and empirically analyze how the exposure at default should be modeled to obtain accurate estimates of the expected loss. Our empirical analysis is based on a large and unique dataset from a retail portfolio of a European bank. We demonstrate that some approaches can lead to substantially biased estimates of the expected loss and show that the generalized cohort approach is advantageous. Moreover, using in- and out-of-sample analyses, we empirically demonstrate that using the credit conversion factor is preferable to the loan equivalent factor, exposure at default factor, and direct exposure at default estimation to achieve high estimation accuracy.