Default risk has been at the centre of the global financial crisis. This article highlights some results from recent research on household repayment behaviour.
We propose a new measure of the debt burden as a superior predictor of default risk, identify a level signal of household overindebtedness, simulate the share of overindebted households in loan repayments, and focus on regional differences in borrowing and overindebtedness and their relation to the regional variation of economic shocks.