March 4, 2022
The Effects of Price Controls on Payment-Card Interchange Fees: A Review and Update
A review of the literature demonstrates that interchange-fee caps do more harm than good, especially for lower-income consumers.
Resources: Scholarship
November 4, 2021
Credit Cards and the Reverse Robin Hood Fallacy: Do Credit Card Rewards Really Steal from the Poor and Give to the Rich?
This paper considers the evidence for and against the reverse Robin Hood hypothesis, finding that the reverse Robin Hood may be more mythical than the original Robin Hood.
November 1, 2017
Punishing Rewards: How clamping down on credit card interchange fees can hurt the middle class
Over the past 20 years, credit cards have become an increasingly popular means of paying for goods and services in Canada. Today nearly 90 percent of Canadian adults own a credit card and approximately 65 percent of all point of sale payments are made using credit cards.
September 1, 2017
The Fundamental Flaws in Behavioral L&E Arguments Against No-Surcharge Laws
During the past decade, academics—predominantly scholars of behavioral law and economics—have increasingly turned to the claimed insights of behavioral economics in order to craft novel policy proposals in many fields, most significantly consumer credit regulation.
June 1, 2014
Price Controls on Payment Card Interchange Fees: The U.S. Experience
The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation capped debit card interchange fees for banks with assets of $10 billion. Credit card and prepaid card interchange fees were not regulated.
January 1, 2014
Uncertainty, Evolution and Behavioral Economic Theory
Armen Alchian was one of the great economists of the twentieth century, and his 1950 paper, Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, one of the most important contributions to the economic literature.
June 2, 2010
THE ECONOMICS OF PAYMENT CARD INTERCHANGE FEES AND THE LIMITS OF REGULATION
Summary Fresh off of the most substantial national liquidity crisis of the last generation and the enactment of sweeping credit card regulation in the form of the Credit CARD Act,…