Ian Ayres of Yale, together with Jeff Lingwall and
Sonia Steinway, have written Skeletons in the Database: An Early Analysis of the CFPB's Consumer Complaints. Here's the abstract:
Analyzing a new data set of 110,000 consumer complaints lodged with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we find that (i) Bank of America, Citibank, and PNC Bank were significantly less timely in responding to consumer complaints than the average financial institution; (ii) consumers of some of the largest financial services providers, including Wells Fargo, Amex, and Bank of America, were significantly more likely than average to dispute the company‘s response to their initial complaints; and (iii) among companies that provide mortgages, OneWest Bank, HSBC, Nationstar Mortgage, and Bank of America all received more mortgage complaints relative to mortgages sold than other banks. In addition, regression analysis suggests that consumer financial companies respond differently to complaints about different products and based on different issues, generating significant differences in timeliness of response, as well as significant differences in whether consumers dispute that response. Moreover, demographics matter: there were significant increases in mortgage complaints per mortgage in ZIP codes with larger proportions of certain populations, including Blacks and Hispanics, as well as an increase in untimeliness and company responses disputed for groups on which the CFPB is mandated to focus, including senior citizens and college students.
