This article describes the provisions of the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), tracing its legal evolution since 1989, when Congress expanded HMDA to require reporting of home mortgage lending by ethnicity and race. HMDA requires most lenders to report the demographic makeup and...

Without regulation, securitization allowed mortgage industry actors to gain fees and to put off risks. During the housing boom, the ability to pass off risk allowed lenders and securitizers to compete for market share by lowering their lending standards, which activated more borrowing. Lenders...

Subprime mortgage lending has grown rapidly in recent years and with it, so have concerns about predatory lending. In response to evidence of predatory lending, most states have enacted new laws or expanded existing laws to address abuses in the subprime home loan market. The effect of these...

The role of bankruptcy law in credit markets has received renewed attention in the aftermath of the housing bubble collapse. The fundamental challenge for research on this topic is to separate the impact of legal factors from other features of the credit environment. We do so by exploiting...

Is software licensed or sold? Software licensing occupies a unique position at the intersection of contracts, intellectual property, and commercial law doctrines. The difficulty in analyzing software licensing issues directly results from the sui generis nature of software which leads to the...

There is little consensus as to the cause of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Numerous explanations exist: misguided monetary policy; a global savings surplus; government policies encouraging affordable homeownership; irrational consumer expectations of rising...

Recent proposals to address housing market troubles through principal modification could increase the cost of credit in the mortgage market. We explore this possibility using historical variation in federal judicial rulings regarding whether Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers could reduce the...

Recent proposals to address housing market troubles through principal modification could increase the cost of credit in the mortgage market. We explore this possibility using historical variation in federal judicial rulings regarding whether Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers could reduce the...

Recent proposals to address housing market troubles through principal modification raise the possibility that such policies could increase the cost of credit in the mortgage market. We explore this using historical variation in federal judicial rulings regarding whether Chapter 13 bankruptcy...

Research to date does not demonstrate a causal chain from financial education to welfare-enhancing financial behavior, in part due to biases, heuristics, and emotional influences on decisions. Yet the search for effective financial education continues. But it is time to ask whether giving every...