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Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure-requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well.More Than You Wanted to Knowsurveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices? Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite. Timely and provocative,More Than You Wanted to Knowtakes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.

Notwithstanding ERISA's fiduciary requirements, a significant portion of 401(k) plans establish investment menus that predictably lead investors to hold high-cost portfolios. Using data from more than 3,500 401(k) plans with more than $120 billion in assets, we provide evidence that fees and menu restrictions in an average plan lead to a cost of seventy-eight basis points in excess of index funds. We also document a wide array of \"dominated\" menu options, which we define as funds that make no substantial contribution to menu diversity but charge fees significantly higher than those of comparable funds in the marketplace. We argue that courts should read existing fiduciary-duty law to challenge plans that imprudently include high-cost or dominated options, even if other options are available in the plan menu. But because heightened fiduciary duties are unlikely by themselves to solve the problem of excess fees and dominated funds, we also propose three additional structural reforms. We argue that lowcost default options be made universally available, that investors be permitted to roll assets out of designated high-cost plans, and that participants be required to demonstrate financial sophistication before investing in higher-cost funds.

Regulatory response to the problem of excessive surcharging by merchants for payment by credit card and debit cards in Australia - Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) new standard - amendments made by the Competition and Consumer (Payment Surcharges) Act 2016 (Cth) - international context.

Previous literature has reported that pension funds sponsored by public organizations present greater administrative expenses when compared to similar pension funds sponsored by private organizations. We investigate this sponsor bias, hypothesizing that it may originate from the omission of relevant control variables, specifically variables for location of headquarters and the level of outsourced services. We test this hypothesis by linear regression in the cross-section of 164 Brazilian closed pension funds, using annual data from 2010 to 2014. We find that these control variables partly explain the sponsor bias, especially for medium-size pension funds, and when the sponsor is an organization related to a state or municipal government. We also hypothesize that political bias may increase administrative expenses of public sponsor pension funds, especially in election years. We test this hypothesis by panel regression using a fixed effects method and did not find statistically significant changes in administrative expenses in election years. Our findings do not support the hypothesis of political bias in administrative expenses of Brazilian closed pension funds. On the contrary, we present evidence that the sponsor bias may be driven by characteristics of the pension funds omitted in previous literature.

This book presents the first full-length explanation in English of Heinsohn and Steiger's groundbreaking theory of money and interest, which emphasizes the role played by private property rights. Ownership economics gives an alternative explanation of money and interest, proposing that operations enabled by property lead to interest and money, rather than exchange of goods. Like any other approach, it has to answer economic theory's core question: what is the loss that has to be compensated by interest? Ownership economics accepts neither a temporary loss of goods, as in neoclassical economics, nor Keynes's temporary loss of already existing, exogenous money as the cause of interest. Rather, money is created as a non-physical title to property in a credit contract secured by a debtor's collateral and the creditor's net worth. This book is an edited English translation of a highly successful German text, and offers the first book-length treatment of a theory which has received much interest since its first appearance in articles in the late 1970s.