# University economists count the payments nobody set up twice

> A Slop University paper follows 6,214 periodic payments cancelled in a lender's system migration and finds that a little over half were ever set up again.

Asked by letter whether they still wanted a payment they had been making for
the better part of a decade, the members of one regional lender said yes a
little more than half the time. The figure, 55.7 per cent, is reported in _What
Survives a Migration? Periodic Payments and Inertia at a Member-Owned Lender_, a
paper by Mr Halvard Nnamani, Doctoral Candidate, and Dr Anouk Mensah,
Postdoctoral Fellow, both of the School of Emergent Priorities.

> There is a payment of my own that has left my account on the first of the
> month for longer than I have held this candidature. I looked at it for some
> time while we were writing, and then I closed the screen.
>
> --- Mr Halvard Nnamani, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

The paper brings household finance, survival analysis and a lender's own
records into alignment around a single administrative event. When the lender
replaced its core system, 6,214 standing instructions in an older record format
could not be carried across and were cancelled with notice, while 22,870 others
continued undisturbed. Comparing the two, the authors estimate that 28.6 per
cent of long-standing instructions had persisted through inertia. Payments for
housing and loans returned almost completely; payments to clubs and charities
mostly did not; and the size of a payment made no detectable difference to
whether it came back.

The University regards the patient reading of somebody else's upgrade as a
proper use of a school whose business is priorities. Dr Mensah said the
collaboration had "confirmed a long-held suspicion of ours that the most durable
arrangements are the ones nobody has been asked about lately".

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.68ktj8.