I had thought we were in the dog days of summer, but the Farmer’s Almanac tells me that I was wrong about that. It turns out that the phrase refers to certain specific dates on the calendar, not just to the hot and steamy days that descend on the nation’s capital in . . . well, whenever they do (and not just before Labor Day, that’s for sure). The true dog days, it turns out, are July 3-Aug. 11, no matter the weather. So maybe this is just the cat’s tuches of summer, as if that makes it better.

Read the full piece here.

Abstract

Student loan servicers are the face of the U.S. student loan system, and they are not well-liked. Using the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (the CFPB) consumer complaint database, we study borrower perceptions of the student loan system. We qualitatively analyzed a sample of complaint narratives drawn from every student loan complaint ever filed with the CFPB. Our analysis of these complaint narratives reveals clear patterns of discontent in four primary areas: 1) a mismatch between ability to repay and repayment options, including problems with forbearance, deferments, the public service loan forgiveness program, income-driven repayment plans, and loan cancellation options; 2) customer service, including sudden and unexplained changes in payment obligations, 3) inappropriate payment processing, such as misapplying payments; and 4) unauthorized loans or outright scams. The first issue was, by far, the most common. Our results high-light areas where better regulation, whether through contract with the government, ex ante supervision by regulators, or ex post lawsuits in court, has the potential to improve the function of the student loan ecosystem.

ICLE Academic Affiliate Todd Zywicki joined Southwest Public Policy Institute President Patrick M. Brenner on SPPI’s SPPI-TV podcast to discuss interest rate caps and the role of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Video of the full episode is embedded below.

Abstract

This paper looks at consumer complaints about student loan lenders and servicers from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB’s) consumer complaint database. Using a novel dataset drawn from 30,678 complaints filed against 212 student loan companies, we analyze consumers’ subjective views about whether traditional or fintech student loan lenders and servicers provide a better customer experience. Overall, we find that consumers initiate far fewer complaints against fintech lenders than traditional lenders. But we find that fintech lenders are twenty-eight times more likely than traditional lenders to receive complaints for making confusing or misleading advertisements. Our data also show that complaints against fintech lenders or servicers have not risen in parallel with greater loan volume by those firms, despite the rising number of complaints being filed against traditional lenders and servicers, as those firms continue to dominate the market share of student loan lending and servicing. We consider various reasons for this difference, including whether this means fintech student loan companies are providing a better consumer experience.

Summary

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. Over the same period, these ideas have also gained traction with policymakers, resulting in a variety of legislative efforts, such as the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In 2016 the issue reached the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari in Expressions Hair Design v. New York for the October 2016 term. The case, which centers on a decades-old New York state law that prohibits merchants from imposing surcharge fees for credit card purchases, represents the first major effort to ground constitutional law (here, First Amendment law) in the claims of behavioral economics.

In this article we examine the merits of that effort. Claims about the real-world application of behavioral economic theories should not be uncritically accepted— especially when advanced to challenge a state’s commercial regulation on constitutional grounds. And courts should be especially careful before relying on such claims where the available evidence fails to support them, where the underlying theories are so poorly developed that they have actually been employed elsewhere to support precisely opposite arguments, and where alternative theories grounded in more traditional economic reasoning are consistent with both the history of the challenged laws and the evidence of actual consumer behavior. The Petitioners in the case (five New York businesses) and their amici (scholars of both behavioral law and economics and First Amendment law) argue that New York’s ban on surcharge fees but not discounts for cash payments violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment. The argument relies on a claim derived from behavioral economics: namely, that a surcharge and a discount are mathematically equivalent, but that, because of behavioral biases, a price adjustment framed as a surcharge is more effective than one framed as a discount in inducing customers to pay with cash in lieu of credit. Because, Petitioners and amici claim, the only difference between the two is how they are labeled, the prohibition on surcharging is an impermissible restriction on commercial speech (and not a permissible regulation of conduct). Assessing the merits of the underlying economic arguments (but not the ultimate First Amendment claim), we conclude that, in this case, neither the behavioral economic

The Petitioners in the case (five New York businesses) and their amici (scholars of both behavioral law and economics and First Amendment law) argue that New York’s ban on surcharge fees but not discounts for cash payments violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment. The argument relies on a claim derived from behavioral economics: namely, that a surcharge and a discount are mathematically equivalent, but that, because of behavioral biases, a price adjustment framed as a surcharge is more effective than one framed as a discount in inducing customers to pay with cash in lieu of credit. Because, Petitioners and amici claim, the only difference between the two is how they are labeled, the prohibition on surcharging is an impermissible restriction on commercial speech (and not a permissible regulation of conduct). Assessing the merits of the underlying economic arguments (but not the ultimate First Amendment claim), we conclude that, in this case, neither the behavioral economic

Assessing the merits of the underlying economic arguments (but not the ultimate First Amendment claim), we conclude that, in this case, neither the behavioral economic theory, nor the evidence adduced to support it, justifies the Petitioners’ claims. The indeterminacy of the behavioral economics underlying the claims makes for a behavioral law and economics “just-so story”—an unsupported hypothesis about the relative effect of surcharges and discounts on consumer behavior adduced to achieve a desired legal result, but that happens to lack any empirical support. And not only does the evidence not support the contention that consumer welfare is increased by permitting card surcharge fees, it strongly suggests that, in fact, consumer welfare would be harmed by such fees, as they expose consumers to potential opportunistic holdup and rent extraction.

As far as we know, this is the first time the Supreme Court has been expressly asked to consider arguments rooted in behavioral law and economics in reaching its decision. It should decline the offer.

In yesterday’s hearings on the disastrous launch of the federal health insurance exchanges, contractors insisted that part of the problem was a last-minute specification from the government:  the feds didn’t want people to be able to “window shop” for health insurance until they had created a profile and entered all sorts of personal information.

That’s understandable.  For this massive social experiment to succeed — or, at least, to fail less badly — young, healthy people need to buy health insurance.  Policy prices for those folks, though, are going to be really high because (1) the ACA requires all sorts of costly coverages people used to be able to decline, and (2) the Act’s “community rating” and “guaranteed issue” provisions prevent insurers from charging older and sicker people an actuarily appropriate rate and therefore require their subsidization by the young and healthy.  To prevent the sort of sticker shock that might cause young invincibles to forego purchasing insurance, Obamacare advocates didn’t want them seeing unsubsidized insurance rates.  Determining a person’s subsidy, though, requires submisison of all sorts of personal information.  Thus, the original requirement that website visitors create a profile and provide gobs of information before seeing insurance rates.

Given the website’s glitches and the difficulty of actually creating a working profile, the feds have now reversed course and are permitting window shopping.  An applicant can enter his or her state and county, family size, and age range (<50 or >50) and receive a selection of premium estimates.  To avoid dissuading people from applying for coverage in light of high premiums, the website takes great pains to emphasize that the estimated premiums do not account for the available subsidies to which most people will be entitled.  For example, to get my own quote, I had to answer a handful of questions and click “Next” a few times, and in the process of doing so, the website announced seven times that the estimated prices I was about to see would not include the generous subsdies to which I would probably be entitled.  The Obamacare folks, you see, want us consumers to know what we’re really going to have to pay.

Or do they?

According to the website, I could buy a Coventry Bronze $15 co-pay plan for $218.03 per month (unsubsidized).  An Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Direct Access Plan would cost me $213.39 per month (unsubsidized).  When I went to a private exchange and conducted the same inquiry, however, I learned that the price for the former policy would be $278.66 and, for the latter, between $270.17.  So the private exchange tells me the price for my insurance would be 27% percent higher than the amount Healthcare.gov estimates in its window shopping feature.  What gives?

As it turns out, the federal exchange assumes (without admitting it) that anyone under age 49 is 27 years old.  The private website, by contrast, based quotes on my real age (42).  Obviously, the older a person is, the higher the premium will be.  Since the ACA mandates that individuals up to age 26 be allowed to stay on their parents’ insurance policies, the age the federal website assumes is the very youngest age at which most people would be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty.  In other words, the federal website picks the rosiest assumption in estimating insurance premiums and never once tells users it’s doing so.  It does, however, awkwardly remind them seven times in fewer than seven consecutive screens that their actual premiums will probably be lower than the figure quoted.

Can you imagine if a private firm pulled this sort of stunt?  Elizabeth Warren’s friends at the CFPB would be on it like white on rice!

Look, the website problems are a red herring.  Sure, they’re shockingly severe, and they do illustrate the limits of government to run things effectively, limits the ACA architects resolutely disregarded.  But they’ll get fixed eventually.  The main reason they’re a long-term problem is that they exacerbate the Act’s most fundamental flaw: its tendency to create a death spiral of adverse selection in which older and sicker people, beneficiaries under the ACA, purchase health insurance, while young, healthy folks, losers under the Act, forego it.  Once this happens, insurance premiums will skyrocket, encouraging even more young and healthy people to drop out of the pool of insureds and thereby making things even worse.  The most significant problem stemming from the website “glitches” (my, how that term has been stretched!) is that they have made it so hard to apply for insurance that only those most desperate for it — the old and sick, the ones we least need in the pool of insureds — will go through the rigmarole of signing up.  On this point, see Holman Jenkins and George Will.

But who knows.  Maybe Zeke Emanuel can fix the problem by getting the Red Sox to sell Obamacare to young invincibles.  (I’m not kidding.  That was his plan for avoiding adverse selection.)

Go Cards!

Filed under: consumer financial protection bureau, consumer protection, health care, health care reform debate, regulation, truth on the market

My paper with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg (D.C. Circuit; NYU Law), Behavioral Law & Economics: Its Origins, Fatal Flaws, and Implications for Liberty, is posted to SSRN and now published in the Northwestern Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

Behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to produce a body of evidence that individual choice behavior departs from that predicted by neoclassical economics in a number of decision-making situations. Emerging close on the heels of behavioral economics over the past thirty years has been the “behavioral law and economics” movement and its philosophical foundation — so-called “libertarian paternalism.” Even the least paternalistic version of behavioral law and economics makes two central claims about government regulation of seemingly irrational behavior: (1) the behavioral regulatory approach, by manipulating the way in which choices are framed for consumers, will increase welfare as measured by each individual’s own preferences and (2) a central planner can and will implement the behavioral law and economics policy program in a manner that respects liberty and does not limit the choices available to individuals. This Article draws attention to the second and less scrutinized of the behaviorists’ claims, viz., that behavioral law and economics poses no significant threat to liberty and individual autonomy. The behaviorists’ libertarian claims fail on their own terms. So long as behavioral law and economics continues to ignore the value to economic welfare and individual liberty of leaving individuals the freedom to choose and hence to err in making important decisions, “libertarian paternalism” will not only fail to fulfill its promise of increasing welfare while doing no harm to liberty, it will pose a significant risk of reducing both.

Download here.

 

Filed under: behavioral economics, behavioral economics, consumer financial protection bureau, consumer protection, economics, free to choose, Hayek, law and economics

From the WSJ:

White House regulatory chief Cass Sunstein is leaving his post this month to return to Harvard Law School, officials said Friday.

Mr. Sunstein has long been an advocate of behavorial economics in setting policy, the notion that people will respond to incentives, and has argued for restraint in government regulations. As such, he was met with skepticism and opposition by some liberals when he was chosen at the start of the Obama administration.

As administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, his formal title, Mr. Sunstein led an effort to look back at existing regulations with an eye toward killing those that are no longer needed or cost effective. The White House estimates that effort has already produced $10 billion in savings over five years, with more to come.

“Cass has shown that it is possible to support economic growth without sacrificing health, safety and the environment,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. He said these reforms and “his tenacious promotion of cost-benefit analysis,” will “benefit Americans for years to come.”

Even so, conservatives point to sweeping new regulations for the financial sector and health care in arguing that the administration has increased the regulatory burden on businesses.

Mr. Sunstein will depart this month for Harvard, where he will rejoin the law school faculty as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy.

It will be interesting to hear, once Professor Sunstein returns to an academic setting, his views on whether and in what instances — aside from the CFPB — behavioral economics actually had much impact on the formation of regulatory policy within the Administration.

Filed under: behavioral economics, regulation