Because of the difficulty in securing traditional forms of credit, the poor are often driven into the fringe economy for check cashing, bill paying and short-term loans. These services involve high user fees and exorbitant interest rates that rival or even exceed those for illegal loan sharking....

Pay day lending has become controversial as activists, such as the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), attempt to restrict its growth. A review of information maintained by the Oklahoma regulatory authority reveals that CRL misrepresents data in order to further its reform agenda. As a...

Initial provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act excluded disproportionately minority agricultural and domestic workers, occupational groups not enrolled in Social Security until the early 1950s. This article estimates the economic value of the exclusion of these workers, in addition to...

Historians of African-America have long noted the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the early years of Social Security, which denied benefits to disproportionately Black workers. Archives of the Social Security Administration and period ethnographies attribute this exclusion to...