Supervisory Research Forum

Join SURF

Join the SURF community to receive quarterly information about upcoming SURF sponsored events. You can also contact us at SYS.SURF@phil.frb.org. We welcome your interest and feedback.

SURF Newsletters

View previous spotlights and briefs.

Events

We sponsor seminars, panels, workshops, and conferences in consumer finance, financial innovations, digitalization, payments, financial climate risks, and, more broadly, supervision and financial stability.

Forthcoming events:

The Philadelphia Fed and the Supervisory Research Forum (SURF) will organize a virtual Workshop on Innovations in Credit Scoring on July 13, 2026. This event will unite industry leaders, academics, and regulators to discuss the future of credit scoring.

The Philadelphia Fed and SURF will organize the Sixth Biennial Conference on Auto Lending on October 29–30, 2026. The Conference on Auto Lending is a forum for the presentation and discussion of academic and policy-relevant research on topics related to auto lending and consumer finance. The paper submission deadline is July 15, 2026.

The Philadelphia Fed will organize a conference on Frontiers in Machine Learning and Economics: Methods and Applications on November 6, 2026. This event is being jointly organized with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The goal of this annual conference is to bring together leading researchers across fields that work at the intersection of machine learning and the social sciences. This year’s conference will be held in Philadelphia. The paper submission deadline is July 12, 2026.

Recordings from past SURF-sponsored events are available at the SURF YouTube channel.

For additional events sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, please visit the upcoming events calendar page.

Additionally, our partner agencies sponsor a variety of events of interest to the regulatory community.

FDIC Bank Research Conference – This annual conference, organized by the FDIC Center for Financial Research, serves as a platform to discuss innovative research on bank-related topics. The conference will be held September 24–25, 2026, in Arlington, VA.

For a comprehensive list of events from the FDIC, visit the FDIC events page.

The Supervisory Policy Forum (SURF) in collaboration with our interagency partners organizes a SURF interagency seminar series open to supervisory agency staff only.

Future scheduled presentations include:

“The Life Experience of Central Bankers and Policy Decisions.” Carlos Madeira, Central Bank of Chile. September 15, 2026.

Recent presentations include:

“Beyond Guardrails: The Path to Generative AI Governance.” Joseph Breeden, Deep Future Analytics LLC. June 9, 2026.
“Do Borrowers Exploit Credit Card Default as Insurance? A New Test of Opportunistic Borrowing.” Michaela Pagel, Washington University in St. Louis, Olin School of Business. May 19, 2026.
“Misaligned by Design: Incentive Failures in Machine Learning.” Philip Marx, Louisiana State University. March 3, 2026. “Automated Credit Limit Increases and Consumer Welfare.” Patrick Moran, Federal Reserve Board, December 9, 2026.
"Large Language Models: An Applied Econometric Framework.” Ashesh Rambachan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. October 28, 2025.

Recordings from past SURF-sponsored seminars are available at the SURF YouTube channel.

Recent Research from the SURF Network

The SURF community is actively involved in advancing the frontier of knowledge in risk management, financial institutions, and financial markets. Here we highlight some of the most recent research and policy work.

“Inside the Boardroom: Evidence from the Board Structure and Meeting Minutes of Community Banks,” FDIC Center for Financial Research Working Paper No. 2024-04 – Rosalind L. Bennett, Manju Puri & Paul E. Soto

“CEO Ownership, Risk Management, and Bank Runs at Unlimited Liability Banks During the 1890s,” FDIC Center for Financial Research Working Paper No. 2024-03 – Haelim Anderson, Jaewon Choi & Jennifer Rhee

“Deposit Insurance and Bank Funding Stability: Evidence from the TAG Program,” FDIC Center for Financial Research Working Paper No. 2024-02 – Ajay Palvia, George Shoukry & Anna-Leigh Stone

“Explaining the Life Cycle of Bank-Sponsored Money Market Funds: An Application of the Regulatory Dialectic,” FDIC Center for Financial Research Working Paper No. 2024-01 – Stefan Jacewitz, Jonathan Pogach, Haluk Unal & Chengjun Wu

For a comprehensive list of FDIC working papers, visit the FDIC 2024 working papers web page.

Federal Reserve of Philadelphia Recent Featured Research:

Here is some recent research of particular interest to the SURF community.

A working paper by Canals-Cerda, “Model Risk Under CECL: A Consumer Finance Perspective,” examines the challenges of economic forecasting and model misspecification errors confronted by financial institutions implementing the novel current expected credit loss (CECL) allowance methodology and its impact on model risk and bias in CECL projections.

A working paper by Chatterjee and Eyigungor, “Explaining Contract Heterogeneity in the Credit Card Market,” leverages administrative data to establish facts on terms, usage, and default rate of credit card accounts. A credit card model is developed to explain the facts. The model explains high MPCs and implies the rate caps are welfare-reducing.

A working paper by Hossain and Livshits, “Not Cashing In on Cashing Out: An Analysis of Low Cash-Out Refinance Rates,” ascertains that more than half of borrowers who have both home equity and high-interest loans fail to reduce their overall debt burden by folding this high-interest debt into a lower-interest mortgage when they undertake a mortgage refinance.

A working paper by Amornsiripanitch, “What Is My Home Worth?” shows that assessed market value (AMV) is a noisy proxy for transaction-based market value (TMV). The author finds that AMV changes causally affect the likelihood that households take out a new home equity line of credit (HELOC) with a similar economic magnitude as TMV changes.

View prior highlighted research.