The Model Fair Debt Buying Practices Act would regulate the activities of a person or entity that has purchased charged-off debt. It would establish clear procedures, minimum documentation requirements, and affirmative obligations before a debt buyer can: (1) contact a debtor, (2) initiate a...

According to conventional macroeconomics, public debt has a significant effect on the economy since consumers see public debt as net wealth, however, according to the Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis, that effect would be absent. This paper's results, obtained from Euler equation estimations,...

This paper provides a simple, generic introduction to, and survey of, the transactional structures and rudimentary principles applicable to Shari`ah-compliant home purchase financings. The paper summarizes six of the most frequently used home purchase financing structures used by banks and...

The dramatic impact of the current crisis on performance of businesses across sectors and economies have been headlining the business press for the past many months. Interestingly, the impact of the crisis across categories of goods/services and across economies reveals several interesting...

We study how forcing financially distressed consumer debtors to repay a larger fraction of debt can lead them to misreport data fraudulently. Using a plausibly exogenous policy change that required debtors to increase repayment to creditors, we document that debtors manipulated data to avoid...

This Article explores consumer collection litigation through original research from more than five hundred cases filed in the Dallas County courts. It analyzes the data within the context of the modern debt collection industry, paying special attention to the role of debt buyers and to the...

Debt moratoria that allow borrowers to postpone loan payments are a frequently used tool intended to soften the impact of economic crises. This paper reports results from a nationwide experiment with a large consumer lender in India, designed to study how debt forbearance offers affect loan...

Russia's retail landscape, 1860s-1890s -- Palaces of retailing and consumption -- For God, tsar, and consumerism -- Visions of modernity: gender and the retail marketplace, 1905-1914 -- Consuming the city: the culture of the retail marketplace -- War and revolution in the marketplace, 1914-1921...

This paper examines the extent to which consumption in Russian households responds to exogenous income shocks. During the time period studied in this paper (1994-1998), Russia experienced two major economic crises. Both featured extreme movements in the real ruble-dollar exchange rate. The price...