Adam Smith justified the contemporary usury laws and was severely criticised by Bentham and most modern writers with the important exception of J.M. Keynes. We argue that pace Bentham, Smith did not intend to preclude loan financing of all 'risky' ventures and give a 'monopoly' to safe...

The Uniform Small Loan Law (USLL) was the Russell Sage Foundation's primary device for fighting what it viewed as the scourge of high-rate lending to poor people in the first half of the twentieth century. The USLL created a new class of lenders who could make small loans at interest rates...

In a world where the means of exchange is convertible into the numeraire consumption good at a fixed rate, no one wants to hold money over time - and due to convertibility there is no means by which the Friedman rule can generate deflation. This is the environment we study in this paper in order...

In a world where the means of exchange is convertible into the numeraire consumption good at a fixed rate, no one wants to hold money over time - and due to convertibility there is no means by which the Friedman rule can generate deflation. This is the environment we study in this paper in order...

If financial deepening aids economic growth, then financial repression should be harmful. We use a natural experiment in the change in the English usury laws in 1714 to analyze the effects of interest rate restrictions. We use a sample of individual loan transactions to demonstrate how the...

Usury laws cap the interest rates that lenders can charge. Using data from Prosper.com, an online lending marketplace, I investigate the effects of these laws. The key to my empirical strategy is that there was initially substantial variability in states' interest rate caps, ranging from 6% to...

Usury laws cap the interest rates that lenders can charge. Using data from Prosper.com (an online lending marketplace), I show how interest rate caps affect: 1) the probability that a loan is funded; 2) the amount a borrower requests; 3) the interest rate at which a loan is funded; and 4) loan...