Mortgage originators use credit score cutoff rules to determine how carefully to screen loan applicants. Recent research has hypothesized that these cutoff rules result from a securitization rule of thumb. Under this theory, an observed jump in defaults at the cutoff would imply that...

Keys, Mukherjee, Seru, and Vig (2010) argue that the evidence presented in Bubb and Kaufman (2009) is based on an inappropriate pooling of loans sold to private-label securitizers with loans sold to the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). In this paper we investigate the issues raised by...

In this paper we show how ownership of the firm by its customers, as well as nonprofit status, can prevent the firm from exploiting consumer biases. By eliminating an outside residual claimant with control over the firm, these alternatives to investor ownership reduce the incentive of the firm...

We assess the effect of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws on public corruption in the United States. Specifically, we investigate the impact of switching from a weak to a strong state-level FOIA law on corruption convictions of state and local government officials. The evidence suggests...

We investigate the structure of mutual funds' corporate governance preferences as revealed by how they vote their shares in portfolio companies. We apply standard unsupervised learning tools from the machine learning literature to analyze a comprehensive dataset of mutual funds' votes and find...

We take a fresh look at the concerns about credit card pricing and empirically investigate whether the Credit CARD Act of 2009 has been successful in addressing those concerns. The rational choice theory of credit card pricing, which posits that issuers use back-end fees to adjust the price of...

The preference of behavioral law and economics (BLE) for regulatory approaches that preserve “freedom of choice” has led to incomplete policy analysis and inefficient policies. BLE has been broadly regarded as among the most promising new developments in public policymaking theory and...