The recent financial crisis has led many to question how well businesses deliver consumer financial services and how well regulatory institutions address problems in consumer financial markets. In response, the Obama administration proposed a new agency to oversee consumer financial services,...

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...

This paper argues that, despite important productivity gains, reforms have benefited consumers much less than expected in El Salvador. Antitrust legislation, consumer protection and an adequate regulation of privatized utilities are central ingredients of a successful market economy. Major...

Two laboratory studies investigated the effect of price transparency on consumers' decision-making in the residential electricity market. The first tested whether consumers have difficulties when confronted with unit prices expressed as discounts from standard rates, which vary between...

Identifying whether hyperbolic advertising claims influence consumers is important for consumer protection, but differentiating mere "puffery" from misleading advertising is not straightforward. We conducted a pre-registered experiment to determine whether pseudo-technical advertising claims...

Much has been written about the problem of consumer credit in the United States over the past decade. In this paper, we survey the prevailing economic theories of consumer credit, which identify a common root problem. Namely, consumers can potentially underestimate borrowing costs, and lenders...

Much has been written about the state of U.S. consumer credit market. In this Article, we provide an overview of the scholarship in this area and an interim diagnosis of the market failure. We identify the chief problem as various epistemic failures on the consumers' part, which lead to poor...

To date the debate over payday lending has focused on whether access to such lending is on net beneficial or harmful to consumer welfare. However, payday loans are not one product but many, and different forms of lending may have different welfare implications. The current diversity in payday...

This paper studies how credit markets respond to policy constraints on household leverage. Exploiting a sharp policy-induced discontinuity in the cost of originating certain high-leverage mortgages, we study how the Dodd-Frank "Ability-to-Repay'" rule affected the price and availability of...

Many professionals in the financial services industry refer to themselves as financial advisers despite tremendous variation in business practices, compensation methods, and duties to act in the best interest of their clients. As a result, both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and...