Approval Regulation and Consumer Finance -- Daniel Carpenter

Spurred in part by recent events and the inadequacy they reveal in existing technical, empirical and historical scholarship on financial regulation, and motivated in part by the work of Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School, I have begun a project, funded by the Tobin Project on Economic Regulation, on the design of a consumer finance regulator and its possible regulatory mechanisms. The theoretical and technical work in this project was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES-0076452 and SES-0519082).

Theoretical Papers

Approval Regulation and the Endogenous Provision of Confidence: Theory and an Analogy to Consumer Finance Regulation (with Justin Grimmer and Eric Lomazoff) [pdf]

Presentations

Approval Regulation: Theory, Empirics and Possible Applications to Consumer Finance [pdf]; presentation to Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Conference on Consumer Protection in Finance; September 11, 2009.

Policy Documents and Editorial Essays

At the request of the Committee on Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives [including Rep. Brad Miller and Chairman Barney Frank], I have been working on administrative, legal and regulatory features of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The idea for such an agency was originally proposed by Elizabeth Warren, was later proposed in a bill by Reps. Delahunt and Miller, and has been written into proposed legislation by the Obama Administration. The following documents reflect my ideas only, and are not necessarily endorsed or supported by any member of the House of Representatives or of the Tobin Project.

Considering a Consumer Finance Safety Commission [The Tobin Project] [pdf]

Proposal for a modified file-and-use process for consumer finance regulation with committed experimentation and public scrutiny of unrecognized loan/credit instruments [pdf]

"How to Restore Consumer Confidence," Boston Globe [op-ed], September 8, 2009