The Center on Finance, Law & Policy at the University of Michigan is an interdisciplinary research center that draws together faculty and students from more than a dozen of Michigan's nineteen schools and colleges to work on a broad range
In this talk Associate Dean Shaefer will chart the journey of recent calls to expand the child tax credit and the rising popularity of the child allowance among poverty scholars, in Congress, and in the Biden Administration.
The University of Michigan's Center on Finance, Law & Policy and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco are co-hosting the second “Central Bank of the Future” Conference on Monday-Wednesday November 16 – 18, 2020, and we hope that you can join us from 12-4 EST.
Join us for a conversation with Lawrence H. Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury, and Maya MacGuineas, President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, on whether the growing federal deficit is sustainable for the United States economy.
More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. policymakers still have not adequately addressed one of the primary causes of the crash: foreign banks.
This event will be virtual.
Ten years after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, and in the midst of an even more devastating economic and public health crisis, what are the risks to the financial system and the U.S. economy? This conference will explore whether the Act created an enduring structure to make the financial system fairer, safer, and better harnessed to the needs of the real economy. Panels will explore the policy choices made in the Dodd-Frank Act, DFA’s implementation over the decade, changes during the Trump Administration, current and potential risks to the financial system, debates over consumer protection, and the future of reform.
Join us for a conversation between Richard Cordray, former Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Michael S. Barr, Dean of the Ford School. They will be speaking about Cordray's new book, Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy.
Join CFLP for our second Blue Bag Lunch Talk of Winter 2020! Professor Elizabeth Anderson will lead our discussion on "Contradictions of the Work Ethic: Shareholder Capitalism and the Capital Share of Income."
The University of Michigan FinTech Collaboratory, of which the Center on Finance, Law & Policy is part, is collaborating with MCubed to announce new funding opportunities for University of Michigan faculty who are undertaking research, course development, or other educational programming focused on financial technology.
The Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment (SEED) initiative began in 2003 to test asset-building accounts for children and youth with the goal of providing strategic and practical lessons in how to create an inclusive CSA system. At the SEED impact assessment site in Michigan (MI-SEED), 500 Head Start families were offered Michigan 529 Educational Savings plans. The accounts were opened with an initial contribution of $800 from program funding and a possible $200 match from the State of Michigan. Any subsequent savings by the family were matched 1:1 up to $1200. Another set of similar Head Start families made up a comparison group that was not offered accounts. Most of the participating pre-school children are now old enough to graduate from high school and actually use the accounts to fund post-secondary education. This presentation will offer preliminary longitudinal data on accounts, standardized test scores, and other educational outcomes over time.
University of Michigan Detroit Center
3663 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201
The University of Michigan's Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project is hosting its first Small Business Showcase. Meet some of the 30 Detroit small business owners who are working with University of Michigan marketing, communications, law, design, and accounting students this fall -- and a few of our superstar alumni businesses, too!
Sixty years ago, Congress established a federal pre-approval regime for bank mergers to protect consumers from then-unprecedented consolidation in the banking sector. This process worked well for several decades, but it has since atrophied, producing numerous “too big to fail” banks.
Professor Kress's research contends that regulators’ current approach to evaluating bank merger proposals is poorly suited for modern financial markets. Policymakers and scholars have traditionally focused on a single issue: whether a bank merger would reduce competition. Over the past two decades, however, changes in bank regulation and market structure—including the repeal of interstate banking restrictions and the emergence of nonbank financial service providers—have rendered bank antitrust analysis largely obsolete. As a result, regulators have rubber stamped recent bank mergers, despite evidence that such deals could harm consumers and destabilize financial markets.
Professor Kress's research asserts that contemporary bank merger analysis should instead emphasize statutory factors that regulators have long neglected: whether a proposed merger would increase systemic risks, enhance the public welfare, and strengthen the relevant institutions. Professor Kress's research urges regulators to modernize their approach, and it proposes a novel framework to ensure that bank merger oversight safeguards the financial system. The proposals contained herein have far-reaching implications not only for bank regulation but also for the ongoing debate over merger policy in technology, agriculture, and other industries.
ComCap19, presented by the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), is a multi-day gathering that offers a unique educational and networking opportunity for all those working toward equitable, resilient, and engaged communities.
*Stream* Gene Sperling provides unique perspective and insights on the intersection between the U.S. and global economy and the most pressing economic policy issues of the day.
Many statutes now permit bounties for whistleblowers who provide enforcement relevant information to the authorities. The growth in such bounties has been quite rapid in recent years generating substantial scholarly, policy and practical interest. However, much of the scholarship does not address a critical feature of corporate liability in the US – there is considerable uncertainty about both the scope and definition of wrongdoing. This talk examines the effects of this uncertainty on the desirable structure and incidence of bounty regimes. Some key findings are that the greater this uncertainty the harder it will be to gather information about wrongdoing both within a firm and more generally because individuals will likely be reluctant to share information that might be relevant to enforcement. This has numerous effects. First, as gathering and sharing of information becomes more difficult it will become harder to deter and prevent wrongdoing, which in part depends on gathering and sharing information. Second, weaker gathering and sharing of information within the firm will hamper the ability of employees to work together cohesively. This not only worsens firm performance (which has its own costs), but also is likely to increase wrongdoing because poor firm performance is a key predicator of corporate wrongdoing. The analysis thus counsels caution in extending whistleblower bounties to areas where the underlying law is uncertain, provides insights on how one might design a bounty system in light of this uncertainty (e.g., differentiating between internal and external whistleblowers, varying bounties by firm size), and lays out certain steps that might be taken to ameliorate some of the identified effects of uncertainty.
Walter and Leonore Annenberg Auditorium, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Rich Cordray, founding director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Rohit Chopra, Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission will keynote.
Local government fiscal health is typically assessed using objective financial indicators, but little is understood about how local officials subjectively understand their own fiscal health. We compare self-assessment data from the Michigan Public Policy Survey with financial data on Michigan local governments to explore the extent to which self-assessments align with conventional financial indicators. Qualitative results reveal that local officials emphasize long-term spending pressures (e.g. roads, infrastructure) and external factors, such as uncertainty around property values and state aid (i.e. revenue sharing) payments, when assessing their fiscal health. Quantitative results provide some corroborating evidence, but in general, conventional indicators are not powerful predictors of self-assessments, especially for high-stress governments. We believe that part of the disparity is that financial indicators do a poor job of capturing what local officials say they are most worried about. We suggest that self-assessments may be a useful supplement to conventional measures in capturing “true” fiscal health.
