Billing without Bilking: Regulating Time-Based Legal Fees

Regulating Debit Cards: The Case of Ad Valorem Fees

Debit cards have become an indispensable part of the U.S. payments system, accounting for more than a third of consumer payments at point of sale. With this development has come controversy: Card networks charge merchants fees that merchants believe are too high. And most of the fees are ad valorem—that is, based on transaction value—rather than fixed fees per transaction. Merchants are critica...

Approaches to Regulating Interchange Fees in Payment Systems

Significant attention worldwide has been paid to the regulation of credit card interchange fees. In part, this attention has followed concerns expressed about the level of these fees in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. The Reserve Bank of Australia recently conducted an extensive inquiry into the interchange fees associated with credit cards and has moved to regulate those fees. At the same time...

Law and psychiatry. Doing forensic work, II: fees, billing, and collections.

Forensic practice fees, billing, and collection procedures are quite different from those in general psychiatry. Most forensic practices have far fewer "clients," and individual bills are usually larger. Collections are usually better (and less frequently discounted) in forensic practice, and resolving billing disputes is far more straightforward. Medicare, Medicaid, other insurance coverage, p...

The Effects of Regulating Penalty Fees for Consumer Financial Products∗

We examine the welfare effects of regulation in a model where firms can shroud add-on costs, such as penalty fees for credit cards. In isolation, imposing price controls or disclosure mandates on such fees can increase or decrease welfare, even when these regulations have no direct costs. There are, however, strong complementarities between price controls and disclosure mandates: conditional on...

A new pandemic--loan bilking.