Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts

Examines bank practices that put consumers at risk, including lack of information on fees, disproportionate overdraft penalties, and mandatory arbitration or fee-sharing provisions in a legal dispute. Includes a model disclosure box and recommendations

The Campus Debit Card Trap: Are Bank Partnerships Fair to Students?

Examines partnerships between colleges and financial firms on campus ID, prepaid, debit, and financial aid disbursement cards and questions about fees, aggressive marketing strategies, and consumer protection. Lists best practices and recommendations

Checks and Balances: 2014 Update

This report is the fourth in a series by The Pew Charitable Trusts examining key checking account terms and conditions. In our first report, in 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts", we studied and reported on the disclosures from the 10 largest banks in the United States by deposit volume. Our second report, in 2012, "Still Risky: An Update on the Safety and Transparency of Checking Accounts" expanded the research and examined the disclosures from the 12 largest banks as well as the 12 largest credit unions. In both reports we highlighted our policy recommendations, which urge the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to write new rules requiring financial institutions to: * Summarize key information about terms and fees in a concise, uniform format. * Provide accountholders with clear, comprehensive terms and pricing information for all available overdraft options.* Make overdraft penalty fees reasonable and proportional to the financial institution's costs in providing the overdraft loan. * Post deposits and withdrawals in a fully disclosed, objective, and neutral manner that does not maximize overdraft fees.* Prohibit pre-dispute mandatory binding arbitration clauses in checking account agreements, which prevent accountholders from accessing courts to challenge unfair and deceptive practices or other legal violations.This study and our 2013 report, "Checks and Balances: Measuring Checking Accounts' Safety and Transparency", rate the 50 largest banks based on how well their disclosure, overdraft, and dispute resolution practices meet these policy recommendations

Checks And Balances: 2015 Update

Checking accounts are a vital financial tool, utilized by 9 in 10 American households. This report provides the third annual evaluation of disclosure, overdraft, and dispute resolution policies and practices of 45 of the nation's 50 largest retail banks, totaling 66 percent of all domestic deposit volume. Pew's Model Summary Disclosure Box for Checking Accounts served as the template for rating each bank's disclosure documents to determine best or good practices for overdraft and dispute resolution. Additionally, this report identified trends among the 32 institutions examined in all three Checks and Balances reports to date. To ensure that all checking accounts are safe and transparent, Pew has also developed a set of policy recommendations and urges the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to incorporate these policies in new rules on overdraft practices and arbitration clauses

Complex transactions under uncertainty : Brazil's machine tool industry

Drawing on the new institutional economics, the author's study of Brazil's machine tool industry extends an earlier study of the garment industry in two ways. First, it broadens the original study to a second industry, which could either confirm or amend the original conclusions. Second, it looks at the effect of economomic uncertainty and expensive formal means of resolving conflict on an industry where enforceable contracts appear necessary for normal business transactions. The machine tool industry is characterized by longer-term contracts and by commitments of resources to products that could not easily be sold to another customer (asset specificity). More formalistic approaches to law and development would suggest that only a legal system that enforces promises in a"knowledgeable, sophisticated, and low-cost way"would allow transactions in the industry (Williamson). By contrast, the new institutional economics looks at other means of governing agreements -- including what Oliver Williamson describes as"bilateral efforts to create and offer hostages."The results show that, while the Brazilian machine tool industry has suffered from a reduction in protection and the effects of a turbulent macroeconomic environment, long-term contracts form specialized equipment are unexpectedly secure. Responses to an enterprise survey show that problems with formal conflict resolution rank low, although the machine tool industry is characterized both by greater compliance with formal rules and by greater reliance on specific, long-term contracts than the garment industry. In fact, machine tool firms report a higher rate of customers honoring orders and making timely payments than do garment firms. Compliance is indeed assured by a sort of"exchange of hostages."The supplier's hostage is the irretrievable investment of physical and human capital in a product difficult to sell to another customer. The customer's hostage is the specific technology bound up in the machine being produced and a payment system that ensures a substantial sunk investment in the machine by the time of delivery. The only attribute of contracts that is frequently renegotiated is the indexation of payments, motivated by macroeconomic instability. Qualitative evidence suggests that this process adds substantially to transaction costs. Not surprisingly, machinetool producers, like their counterparts in the garment industry, place a high priority on a more stable macroeconomic and policy environment.Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Water and Industry,Private Participation in Infrastructure,Microfinance

A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool