Thank You to Professor Arias and Welcome to Professor Barr

All of the regular bloggers at Credit Slips want to thank Professor F. Javier Arias Varona for joining us from Spain's Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It has been a delight to have Professor Arias offer his perspectives on consumer credit and bankruptcy. It is a paradox but true that we can learn a lot about local institutions and laws by looking afar. Professor Arias reminded us that, as U.S. consumer credit and bankruptcy policy has drifted toward less generous debt forgiveness, many of the EU countries (although not yet Arias's home country of Spain) have adopted more generous bankruptcy laws.

That was the going. The coming is that we would like to welcome Professor Michael Barr of the University of Michigan as a guest blogger. Professor Barr has been doing outstanding work for several years on the Detroit Area Study on Financial Services. This study examines the use of financial services by low- and moderate-income households (see here for much more information). All of Professor Barr's work is top-notch, and I recommend his work to those interested in the sorts of issues we cover on Credit Slips (see here for his publication list). On behalf of the regular Credit Slips bloggers, I wanted to welcome him to the site, and thank him for what I am sure will be a series of posts with new perspectives coming out of his work.