Over the past two decades, the scope of technologies that can be patented has been expanded to include many items previously thought unsuitable for patenting, for example, computer software. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants 20,000 or more software patents a year. Conventional...

Although people still use cash to pay for goods and services, the trend is toward payment cards. In the U.S., payment card networks coordinate the activities of thousands of financial institutions, millions of retail locations, and several hundred million consumers. This coordination may include...

The 1980s represented a period of dramatic change in the design and enforcement of U.S. intellectual property law. Many of these changes were adopted in the hopes of stimulating private research and development and improving the technological competitiveness of American industries. This article...

Bob Hunt outlines the history of credit counseling in the U.S. He also observes that, despite its long track record, the credit counseling industry is not without controversy. For example, in recent years, concerns about conflicts of interest and the emergence of a new type of credit counseling...

Why should economic scholars study the consumer debt collection process? First, the cost and effectiveness of the collections process has implications for the pricing and availability of consumer credit. Second, changes in technology and the structure of credit markets have transformed the...

In "What's in the File? The Economics and Law of Consumer Credit Bureaus," author Bob Hunt points out that lenders in the United States have voluntarily shared information about their customers - through credit bureaus - for nearly a century. Hunt explains how sharing information about...

In recent years, the courts have determined that business methods can be patented, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted some 12,000 patents of this sort. Has the availability of patents for business methods increased the rate of innovation in the U.S. financial sector?...

In other parts of the economy, firms are increasingly turning to patents to protect not just physical inventions but more abstract ones such as computer programs or ways of doing business. Just two decades ago such patents would have been impossible to obtain, let alone enforce. In "You Can...