Credit cards and debit cards in the United States and Japan

For valuable comments on earlier drafts, I thank Omri Ben-Shahar, Rebecca Eisenberg, Frances Foster, John Haley, Dan Keating, Atsushi Kinami, Rick Lempert, Lynn LoPucki, Bob Rasmussen, Hiroo Sono, Elizabeth Warren, Jay Westbrook, and Mark West. I also received useful feedback from presentations of all or part of this paper at the Conference on Japanese Law in the 21st Century at the University of Michigan Law School, at Notre Dame Law School, the Faculties of Law at Tohoku University and the University of Tokyo, and at the Japanese Business Law Association. Finally, I could not have completed this work without translation assistance from Keisuke Hasegawa, Mariko Maeda, and Masayuki Tamaruya. For support during the preparation of this paper, and for extraordinary assistance in collecting the information used in this paper, I am grateful to the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies at the Bank of Japan and in particular to Michio Ayuse, Masao Okawa, Naoyuki Iwashita, Nami Numoto, Daisuke Terayama, and Yukari Haga. I also thank the Proffitt Fund at the University of Michigan Law School for unstinting support of this research. MONETARY AND ECONOMIC STUDIES/JANUARY 2002