Consumer Finance

Thanks for having me back at Credit Slips! This week I’ll be blogging about two forms of credit that are increasingly popular: auto title lending and pawnshops.

If financial education classes and lab-tested disclosures are unlikely to help consumers in their real-world financial decisions, what about field-tested targeted education/disclosure? Exciting work by Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse shows that information given to payday borrowers can reduce their future borrowing, holding payday lender behavior static.

Thank you to the Credit Slips team for allowing me to use their soapbox for the last few weeks.  I leave you with a final pet peeve: Why does the government have to rely on commercially-collected financial industry data sets or voluntary surveys of financial firms to discover the effects of policies the government has put in place? This is just embarrassing. The U.S. government has so little power over the financial industry – an industry that only exists by virtue of the full faith and credit, payments systems, FDIC insurance, etc.

In the last post I discussed the potential benefits of price caps in the small loan market, one of which was to bring the price down to what consumer price shopping would produce if it were present in that market. Now I would like to turn to the potential benefit of price caps in even the most (albeit still quite imperfectly) price-competitive credit market, the mortgage market.

There has been a great deal of press recently about the sorry state of the legal jobs market, student debt, and the irrelevance of legal education (see, e.g., here).  A lot of the thinking on these issues has struck me as incredibly ga-ga and muddled and as reflecting unrelated and pre-existing agendas about legal education, student debt, and the role of lawyers in society.