Truth In Lending

This book examines the economic, psychological, sociological, historical, and legal traditions behind the demand for financial disclosures like Truth in Lending as consumer protections, how they have evolved into what they have become today, and how they might be reformed and improved.

This article provides an introduction to a law review symposium by the Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy on our book (co-authored with Michael E. Staten), Consumer Credit and the American Economy (Oxford 2014). The conference, held November 2014, collects several articles responding to and building on the research agenda laid out by our book. For those who have not read the book, this article is intended to summarize several of the main themes of the book, including discussion of economic models of consumer credit usage, trends in consumer credit usage over time, the use of high-cost credit, and behavioral economics.