The Law and Economics of Consumer Finance

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。这一博士后奖学金支持一位正在崛起的社会科学学者研究消费金融合同，重点是它们的法律地位、销售和监管，以及它们对家庭财务健康的影响。消费者的财务状况受到2008年经济衰退的严重影响。在美国，最脆弱的人群是那些依赖不公平或滥用金融合同维持日常生活的人。这些群体往往受到历史上的种族歧视，收入低或变化很大，接受经济教育的机会有限。法律和市场都在保护这些人口方面发挥着重要作用，而不会限制他们通过拥有住房、教育和创造财富在社会上进步的机会。本研究采用多学科方法研究合同法和金融产品营销在弱势家庭财务健康中的作用。首先，将文本法律分析与数据分析相结合，研究长期消费者合同的法律规范，如抵押贷款、年金和学生贷款。这一分析表明，一些消费者合同容易出现事后修改的滥用情况。其次，它使用数据来研究中介机构在消费金融市场中的角色。中介机构可以提供有价值的财务建议，并提高消费者的素养。他们也有通过佣金和低问责制的激励，这促使他们提供低质量的建议。利用抵押贷款经纪人和人寿保险代理人的行政数据，本研究将研究不同监管干预对消费者结果的影响。研究项目的两个部分都将不同地评估法律变化对受短期衰退影响或金融知识水平较低的消费者的影响，为旨在保护最有需要的人群的联邦和州政策制定者提供政策指导。这项研究包括两个方面。第一部分是对长期消费者合同设计的法律研究。美国法律允许消费者签署标准格式的合同，其中大多数从未被阅读或理解，这些合同在个人的一生中具有法律约束力。对于经验丰富的当事人来说，这种做法是合理的，这些当事人可以接触到法律代表和金融专业人士，并可以在破产程序中真正“清算”并在必要时不复存在。消费者没有这些优势，尽管可以获得破产保护，但永远不会完全摆脱合同因信用评分和其他机制而出错的后果。近二十年来关于消费者合同变更纠纷的判例法表明，合同动态的存在一直导致消费者在合同变更过程中受到欺诈、胁迫和不合理的待遇。经济模型表明，旨在遏制这些做法的监管干预将无法保护最有需要的消费者。综上所述，本研究提出了加强金融合同中消费者权利的建议，并提供了一些支持这一结论的实证结果。第二种是实证方法，研究监管对销售代理和财务顾问等销售消费金融合约的中介机构行为的影响。这项工作将专注于两种不同类型的中介-抵押贷款发起人和财务顾问。在2008年金融危机之后，许多评论人士着眼于抵押贷款市场的结构，并猜测贷款人和发起人之间的委托代理问题可能是部分原因。实证分析将使用2002至2012年间房利美或房地美拥有的个人贷款的数据，将所有权和销售结构分散的贷款的违约率和止赎率与垂直整合贷款机构出售的贷款进行比较。这项研究将研究消费者诉讼和州消费者保护法是否会对垂直整合的贷款人的贷款产生不同的影响，相对于分散的垂直结构的贷款人。在财务顾问的情况下，委托代理问题的处理方法是施加受托责任和类似受托责任的责任，使顾问有动力为客户的最佳利益服务，而不是最大化自己的收入。这项研究将利用一家大型人寿保险公司的专有数据，研究国家监管差异对向退休人员销售可变年金和固定年金的影响。第一步将是建立一个管理保险代理人的全面的州级法律数据集，包括每年的变化。第二步将是估计法律严格性对该州销售的产品类型和数量的因果影响，使用州法律变化来近似法律严格性的随机变化。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising social science scholar studying consumer financial contracts, focusing on their legal status, their sale and regulation, and their impact on household financial health. Consumers' financial health has been severely impacted by the 2008 recession. The most vulnerable populations in the United States are those that rely on unfair or abusive financial contracts for their day to day survival. These groups tend to be subject to historical racial discrimination, have low or highly variable incomes, and have limited access to financial education. Both law and markets have an important role in protecting these populations, without limiting their opportunities to advance in society through homeownership, education, and the creation of wealth. This research takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying the roles of contract law and the marketing of financial products in vulnerable households' financial health. First, it combines textual legal analysis with data analysis to study the laws governing long term consumer contracts, such as mortgages, annuities, and student loans. The analysis implies that some consumer contracts are prone to abusive ex post modification. Second, it uses data to study the role of intermediaries in consumer financial markets. Intermediaries can provide valuable financial advice and improve consumer literacy. They also have incentives, through commissions and low accountability, which push them to give low quality advice. Using administrative data on mortgage brokers and life insurance agents, this research will study the effects of different regulatory interventions on consumer outcomes. Both parts of the research project will differentially assess the impact of legal changes on consumers who are subject to short term downturns or who have low financial literacy, providing policy guidance for federal and state policymakers aiming to protect the neediest populations.This research consists of two prongs. The first consists of legal research on the design of long term consumer contracts. American law allows consumers to sign standard form contracts, most of which are never read or understood, that are legal binding for the individual's entire lifetime. This practice is reasonable for sophisticated parties who have access to legal representation and financial professionals, and can truly "liquidate" and cease to exist if necessary during a bankruptcy proceeding. Consumers do not have these advantages, and despite having access to bankruptcy protection, would never be completely freed from the consequences of a contract gone wrong due to credit scores and other mechanisms. Case law on consumer contract modification disputes in the past twenty years demonstrates the existence of contract dynamics that consistently lead to consumers being subject to fraud, duress, and unconscionable treatment during contract modification. Economic models show that regulatory interventions intended to curb these practices will fail to protect the neediest consumers. Taken together, this research proposes strengthening consumer rights within financial contracts and provides some empirical results that support this conclusion. The second prong empirical methods to study the effect of regulation on the behavior of intermediaries, such as sales agents and financial advisors, who sell consumer financial contracts. The work will focus on two different types of intermediaries - mortgage originators and financial advisors. In the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, many commentators looked to the structure of the mortgage market and speculated that principal-agent problems between lenders and originators may be partially to blame. Empirical analysis will be done using data on individual loans owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac between 2002 and 2012, comparing default and foreclosure rates of loans with a dispersed ownership and sales structure to loans sold by a vertically integrated lender. This research will study whether consumer lawsuits and state consumer protection laws differentially impact lending by vertically integrated lenders, relative to lenders with a dispersed vertical structure. In the case of financial advisors, principal-agent problems have been dealt with by imposing fiduciary and fiduciary-like duties that give advisors an incentive to serve their customers' best interests, rather than maximizing their own income. Using proprietary data from a large life insurance company, this research will study the impact of state variation in regulation on the sale of variable annuities and fixed annuities to retirees. The first step will be to build a comprehensive state-level dataset of laws governing insurance agents, including changes year by year. The second step will be to estimate the causal impact of legal stringency on the type and volume of products sold in that state, using state legal changes to approximate a random shift in legal stringency.