Over the past 20 years the consumer payments system has been transformed as electronic payments such as debit and credit cards have rapidly displaced legacy payment systems, especially checks. At the same time, this growth in the use of electronic payments has triggered increasing government...

This paper considers the evidence for and against the reverse Robin Hood hypothesis. Under the “reverse Robin Hood” hypothesis, credit-card companies rob from the poor users of cash and give to the rich users of credit cards. But there are problems with this story. Indeed, the reverse Robin...

We analyze 15.6 million storefront payday loans made to 1.8 million unique borrowers in 2013 to examine payday loan terms and usage. We find that loan prices and loan amounts are generally not at state-mandated maximum levels. For the 30 states in our sample, we find that the number of loans per...

Behavioral Law & Economics (BLE) has loudly proclaimed its victory over traditional law & economics methodologies. Nowhere has this proclamation been so loud or self-certain as with respect to claims about consumer financial decision-making. Drawing on a set of casual observations styled as...

Fresh off of the most substantial national liquidity crisis of the last generation and the enactment of sweeping credit card regulation in the form of the Credit CARD Act, Congress continues to deliberate, with a continuing drumbeat of support from lobbyists, a set of new regulations for credit...

This article reviews the law and economics of consumer debt collection and its regulation, a topic that has taken on added urgency in light of the announcement by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that it is considering new regulations on the subject. Although stricter regulation of...

This article provides an introduction to a law review symposium by the Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy on our book (co-authored with Michael E. Staten), Consumer Credit and the American Economy (Oxford 2014). The conference, held November 2014, collects several articles responding to and...

The issue of consumer payments and data security has reached a high level of public and regulatory interest as a result of a number of recent high-profile data breaches that compromised consumer payment cards. In addition, the ecosystem of consumer payment security has changed dramatically in...

“Behavioral Law and Economics” (BLE) is a specialized component of the legal literature that purports to base its conclusions on a branch of economic analysis known as behavioral economics. The central claim of BLE is that by applying findings of behavioral economics to the real world it can...