Charging Ahead
The Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets around the World

This book was the first comprehensive treatment of credit cards in the global economy.

Ronald J. Mann (Author)

9780521711487, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 23 July 2007

310 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

"...Charging Ahead: The Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets offers a refreshingly balanced perspective on the optimal use of credits...the book manages to be provocative without resort to polemic. Even rarer, Charging Ahead reveals how payment systems law-perhaps the most esoteric topic in the already esoteric world of commercial law -shapes our society and its pursuit of the good life...Charging Ahead elucidates the public effects of our often mindless act of paying with plastic...Charging Ahead concludes with a cogent and careful circumscribed set of strategies for reshaping American appetites for credit card use...provides a concise and readable explication of the variety of payment cards, focusing on the benefits and burdens of debit cards versus credit cards...articulate a persuasive agenda for credit card reform that has international applicability..."
--Katherine Porter, Michigan Law Review [Vol. 106:1167]

This book was the first comprehensive treatment of credit cards in the global economy. The topic is timely not only because of the attention focused on cards as a contributor to the substantial rise in consumer borrowing, but also because of the role of cards in the recent retrenchment in the US bankruptcy system. Relying on data from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan, Charging Ahead includes the first careful statistical analysis of the relation between the rise of credit card use and broader macroeconomic phenomena like consumer borrowing, savings, and bankruptcy. It also provides a broad narrative of how credit cards have come to be used so differently around the world. Finally, it sets out a detailed and coherent program for regulatory intervention grounded in both empirical analysis and the existing theoretical literature.

Introduction
Part I. The Basics of Payment Cards: 1. Paper or plastic? - payment system functionality
2. The mechanics of payment card transactions
Part II. Easy Money: 3. In defense of credit cards
4. The psychology of card payments - card spending and consumer debt
5. Over the brink - credit card debt and bankruptcy
Part III. The Puzzle of Payment Cards: 6. Explaining the pattern of global card use
7. The introduction of the payment card
8. Revolving credit
9. Point-of-sale debit
10. Convergence and exceptionalism in the use of cards
Part IV. Reforming Payment Systems: 11. Indirect approaches: regulating interchange and encouraging surcharges
12. Contract design
13. Regulating information
14. Product design: affinity and rewards programs and teaser rates
Part V. Optimizing Consumer Credit Markets and Bankruptcy Policy: 15. Causation, consumer credit and bankruptcy
16. Regulating consumer credit markets
17. Consumer bankruptcy reform
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: International economic & trade law [LBBM]