The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes a once-in-a-generation investment in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to modernize America’s tax administration and, by doing so, meaningfully increase compliance with the nation’s tax laws. We consider the impact of this investment on new tax...

Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S., based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper revisits this conclusion by incorporating Social Security retirement benefits into measures of wealth...

How do private equity firms impact their portfolio companies? We study this question using comprehensive data on their investments in the life insurance industry, which grew ten-fold from $23 billion to $250 billion between 2009 and 2014. Private equity-backed insurers exhibit superior returns....

For many years, law and economics scholars, as well as politicians and regulators, have debated whether corporate criminal enforcement overdeters beneficial corporate activity or in the alternative, lets corporate criminals off too easily. This debate has recently expanded in its polarization:...

In traditional markets, firms can charge prices that are significantly elevated relative to their costs only if there is a market failure. However, this is not true in a two-sided market (like Amazon, Uber, and Mastercard), where firms often subsidize one side of the market and generate revenue...

The financial crisis exposed major fault lines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—and changed the structure and function of these markets. Consumer advocates...

After the Great Recession, new regulatory interventions were introduced to protect consumers and reduce the costs of financial products. Some voiced concern that direct price regulation was unlikely to help consumers, because banks offset losses in one domain by increasing the prices that they...

This Article focuses on recent regulatory interventions in the consumer finance space, considering three attempts to lower prices: a decrease in merchant interchange costs, a cap on credit card penalty fees and interest rate hikes, and a change to the policy default rule that limited banks'...