Industry use of evidence to influence alcohol policy: a case study of submissions to the 2008 Scottish government consultation.

Jim McCambridge and colleagues analyze industry submissions to a Scottish Government consultation on whole-population approaches to alcohol policy

Regulating on the Fringe: Reexamining the Link Between Fringe Banking and Financial Distress

Critics of fringe banking—products like payday loans, pawn loans, and rent-toown leases—frequently argue that these products cause borrowers to experience financial distress. This argument has enormous intuitive appeal: Fringe credit is very costly, and usually the borrowers who use it are already in a serious financial bind. Taking on additional debt and paying high prices for it, the reasoning goes, drive them over the brink. Surprisingly, however, linking financial distress to fringe banking is extremely difficult to do. This Article represents the first attempt to uncover the relationship between fringe banking and financial distress by systematically analyzing the structure of fringe credit markets and the characteristics of specific fringe credit transactions. Contrary to the assumptions made by the bulk of the literature, I argue that the link between fringe banking and financial distress is dubious. Because fringe creditors cannot rely on borrowers’ credit scores to predict whether they will be repaid, creditors structure fringe credit products to virtually guarantee repayment. Because repayment is guaranteed by the structure of the transaction, it is nearly impossible for borrowers to take on unmanageable debt loads. Yet, a significant amount of regulatory intervention into fringe banking markets is premised upon the relationship between fringe banking and financial distress. Policy makers lump fringe credit together with other forms of credit that do cause financial distress, resulting in misguided and overly broad policies. The Article concludes by exploring the policy implications of determining that fringe banking products do not cause distress

Credit on Wheels: The Law and Business of Auto-Title Lending

Despite the fact that they are used by millions of Americans, auto-title loans have received little attention in the legal literature about consumer credit. Friends and foes of title lending make confident statements about their net welfare effects, but we still lack empirical data on many of the central policy questions that title lending raises. This Article offers new evidence about the title lending transaction, paying special attention to the risks borrowers face when they use their vehicles as collateral for the loan. I gathered this evidence by obtaining new reports from state regulators about the title lending industry, examining public disclosure statements by title lenders, interviewing title lenders, and surveying a small group of title lending customers. Additionally, the Article organizes the different legal responses to title lending, creating a taxonomy of regulatory approaches. Based on the new data uncovered by my research, I offer tentative evaluations of these diverse regulatory strategies

Regulating on the Fringe: Reexamining the Link Between Fringe Banking and Financial Distress

Critics of fringe banking—products like payday loans, pawn loans, and rent-toown leases—frequently argue that these products cause borrowers to experience financial distress. This argument has enormous intuitive appeal: Fringe credit is very costly, and usually the borrowers who use it are already in a serious financial bind. Taking on additional debt and paying high prices for it, the reasoning goes, drive them over the brink. Surprisingly, however, linking financial distress to fringe banking is extremely difficult to do. This Article represents the first attempt to uncover the relationship between fringe banking and financial distress by systematically analyzing the structure of fringe credit markets and the characteristics of specific fringe credit transactions. Contrary to the assumptions made by the bulk of the literature, I argue that the link between fringe banking and financial distress is dubious. Because fringe creditors cannot rely on borrowers’ credit scores to predict whether they will be repaid, creditors structure fringe credit products to virtually guarantee repayment. Because repayment is guaranteed by the structure of the transaction, it is nearly impossible for borrowers to take on unmanageable debt loads. Yet, a significant amount of regulatory intervention into fringe banking markets is premised upon the relationship between fringe banking and financial distress. Policy makers lump fringe credit together with other forms of credit that do cause financial distress, resulting in misguided and overly broad policies. The Article concludes by exploring the policy implications of determining that fringe banking products do not cause distress

The CARD Act on Campus

In February 2010, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act intervened in student credit card markets in a dramatic way, attempting to prevent student over-indebtedness, to end aggressive marketing to college students, and to reveal and change avaricious agreements between credit card issuers and colleges. Yet, two years after it became effective, we still have little measurement of whether the Act has accomplished these goals. This Article offers the first empirical assessment of the rationales for the CARD Act and the Act’s effects. Over the two years since the CARD Act went into effect, I conducted surveys of more than 500 students at two different colleges. I also examined 300 agreements between issuers and college-related organizations, which the CARD Act made publicly available for the first time. Based on this survey and study, I found that many of the CARD Act’s student and young consumer provisions have not affected credit markets in the ways the Act’s proponents had hoped. Young consumers are still qualifying for credit cards without enough earned income to pay off the debt, and students are still reporting high levels of credit card marketing efforts aimed at the students. Most strikingly, the requirement that credit card companies disclose the secret agreements between issuers and colleges has caused virtually no change in the number of these agreements or their terms

Protecting Consumers As Sellers

When the majority of modern contract and consumer protection laws were written in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, consumers almost always acted as buyers, and businesses almost always acted as sellers. As a result, these laws reflect a model of strong sellers and weak buyers. But paradigms are shifting. Advances in technology and constraints on consumers’ financial lives have pushed consumers into new roles. Consumers today often act as sellers—hawking gold to make ends meet, peddling durable goods on eBay, or offering services in the sharing economy to make a profit. Consumers and business models have changed, but the laws have not. This Article uncovers the new role that consumers play as sellers and argues that lawmakers should reform outdated laws to protect them

Selling ART: An Empirical Assessment of Advertising on Fertility Clinics\u27 Websites

Scholarship on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has emphasized the commercial nature of the interaction between fertility patients and their physicians, but little attention has been paid to precisely how clinics persuade patients to choose their clinics over their competitors’. This Article offers evidence about how clinics sell ART based on clinics’ advertising on their websites. To assess clinics’ marketing efforts, I coded advertising information on 372 fertility clinics’ websites. The results from the study confirm some suspicions of prior ART scholarship while contradicting others. For instance, in line with scholars who are concerned that racial minorities face barriers to accessing ART, I found that 97.28% of the websites that contain pictures of babies have pictures of white babies, and 62.93% have pictures of only white babies. Similarly, in agreement with prior work that challenges the effectiveness of self-regulation, I found low levels of compliance with industry-sponsored advertising regulations. Contrary to the assumption held almost universally in the literature on ART, however, I found that clinics do not prioritize advertising their success rates. Clinics’ websites are more likely to emphasize several other attributes of care instead of their success rates. In light of the new data uncovered by this study, I conclude by offering new regulatory directions for policymakers to consider as they try to keep up with changes in the fertility business. Roundtable on Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technology 201