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Working Paper
Fraud deterrence in dynamic Mirrleesian economies
Social and private insurance schemes rely on legal action to deter fraud and tax evasion. This observation guides the authors to introduce a random state verification technology in a dynamic economy with private information. With some probability, an agent's skill level becomes known to the planner, who prescribes a punishment if the agent is caught misreporting. The authors show how deferring consumption can ease the provision of incentives. As a result, the marginal benefit may be below the marginal cost of investment in the constrained-efficient allocation, suggesting a subsidy on savings. ...
Conference Paper
Risk: remarks - 2007 trends in financial risk and fraud
Journal Article
Fed provides tips on avoiding mortgage scams
The Fed has compiled some tips to help protect consumers from becoming victims of foreclosure avoidance scams. It's important for consumers to know that housing counselors and other resources are available at no or low cost to assist homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments.
Working Paper
Liquidity and the threat of fraudulent assets
We study an over-the-counter (OTC) market with bilateral meetings and bargaining where the usefulness of assets, as means of payment or collateral, is limited by the threat of fraudulent practices. We assume that agents can produce fraudulent assets at a positive cost, which generates endogenous upper bounds on the quantity of each asset that can be sold, or posted as collateral in the OTC market. Each endogenous, asset-specific, resalability constraint depends on the vulnerability of the asset to fraud, on the frequency of trade, and on the current and future prices of the asset. In ...
Discussion Paper
Identity theft: a pernicious and costly fraud
On October 3, 2003, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia sponsored a workshop on identity theft to examine its growing impact on participants in our payments system. Avivah Litan, vice president and research director of financial services for Gartner Inc., led the workshop. The discussion began and this paper follows with a broad study of identity theft, at times compared with traditional payment fraud, and continues with an evaluation of its overall risk to consumers, merchants, and credit providers. The paper compares the incentives each such party has to ...
Journal Article
Phishing and pharming: helping consumers avoid Internet fraud
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston?s Consumer Regulation Outreach Group offers advice to Internet users on avoiding scams.
Journal Article
Taken to lunch
One lunch tab cost Jason Snyder more than $10,000 after information from the personal check he wrote was used to steal his identity. There are easy ways to reduce fraud.
Working Paper
The economics of the mutual fund trading scandal
I examine the economic incentives behind the mutual fund trading scandal, which made headlines in late 2003 with news that several asset management companies had arranged to allow abusive--and, in some cases, illegal--trades in their mutual funds. Most of the gains from these trades went to the traders who pursued market-timing and late-trading strategies. The costs were largely borne by buy-and-hold investors, and, eventually, by the management companies themselves. ; A puzzle emerges when one examines the scandal from the perspective of those management companies. In the short run, they ...
Discussion Paper
Identity theft: where do we go from here?
The identity theft forum sponsored by the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Gartner Fellows Program brought together a broad range of stakeholders to discuss the important issue of identity theft. Participants from the financial services and merchant industries, Internet service and technology providers, and regulatory and law enforcement agencies examined issues faced by consumers, merchants, and banks in fighting this financial crime. Discussants shared methodologies used to combat this crime and explored opportunities for coordination in searching for ...