Rawley Z. Heimer
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Research › Consumer protection and financial regulation

Consumer protection and financial regulation

How regulation, supervision, and politics affect people who use financial services, from leverage limits for retail traders and age limits on credit cards to complaint resolution at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Related terms: CFPB, consumer complaints, restitution and redress, leverage limits, Dodd-Frank, fair-lending enforcement, Community Reinvestment Act, Credit CARD Act, gerrymandering.

Published papers

  1. Biased by Choice: How Financial Constraints Can Reduce Financial Mistakes

    With Alex Imas. Review of Financial Studies.

    Limits on borrowing can make investors better off by curbing their behavioral biases.

  2. Politicizing Consumer Credit

    With Pat Akey and Stefan Lewellen. Journal of Financial Economics.

    When a state’s senator becomes a powerful committee chair, credit access in the state’s minority neighborhoods falls by 7.5%.

  3. Should Retail Investors’ Leverage Be Limited?

    With Alp Simsek. Journal of Financial Economics.

    Capping how much leverage retail traders can use made them better off without harming market liquidity.

Working papers

  1. Temporal Focal Points and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from U.S. Mortgage Lending

    With Marco Giacoletti and Edison Yu. Working paper.

    Loan officers’ month-end volume quotas account for at least half of the unexplained racial gap in mortgage approvals, pointing to lender behavior.

  2. Fallible Firms: The Economics of Consumer Redress

    With Charlotte Haendler. Working paper.

    Whether consumers get money back after complaining about a financial firm depends more on who complains than on which firm is involved.

  3. Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit

    With Pat Akey, Christine Dobridge, and Stefan Lewellen. Working paper.

    Consumers lose access to credit when their congressional districts are gerrymandered.

  4. Borrowing Young, Paying Later

    With Allison Cole and Igor Livshits. Draft available on request.

    The Credit CARD Act’s limits on cards for people under 21 raised credit scores and homeownership by age 30 but increased mortgage delinquency.

Other research topics