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Posted: 2015-11-02T18:11:10Z | Updated: 2015-11-02T18:53:55Z

The payday loan industry was involved in almost every aspect of a pro-industry academic study, according to emails and other documents reviewed by The Huffington Post. The revelation calls into question a host of other pro-industry academic studies that were paid for by the same organization.

While the researchers disclosed their funding source for the 2011 paper Do Payday Loans Trap Consumers in a Cycle of Debt? they also assured readers that the industry exercised no control over the research or the editorial content of this paper.

The assertion was patently false, according to correspondence obtained from Arkansas Tech University through an open records request by the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability. The group subsequently shared the documents with HuffPost.

The Campaign for Accountability has filed requests for documents from professors at three other universities -- the University of California, Davis; George Mason University; and Kennesaw State University -- who produced similar pro-industry studies. So far, it has been met with resistance. Only Arkansas Tech turned over a cache of its records.

The emails show that the payday loan industry gave economics professor Marc Fusaro at least $39,912 to write his paper, and paid an undisclosed sum to his research partner, Patricia Cirillo. In return, the industry received early drafts of the paper, provided line-by-line revisions, suggested deleting a section that reflected poorly on payday lenders, and even removed a disclosure detailing the role payday lending played in the preparation of the paper.

Hilary Miller, the president of the Payday Loan Bar Association, a lawyers' group for the industry, worked closely with the researchers on their study. Miller has represented payday lending giant Dollar Financial, and is also the president of the pro-industry group the Consumer Credit Research Foundation.

"This revelation has significant implications for the other research that the Consumer Credit Research Foundation has funded," an industry expert told HuffPost. The foundations website lists six studies that it has funded in whole or part, all of which have influenced political debate over payday lending. Papers funded by the CCRF, by academics affiliated with George Washington University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, among others, have argued that payday lenders do not target black neighborhoods, that there is no good reason to regulate payday loans to the military, and that payday loans are cheaper for consumers than fees tied to bounced checks.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will release a draft of of the first-ever federal rules regulating payday loans before the end of the year

The connection between a pro-payday loan group and academic research comes as there is increased focus on the financial industry's influence over what are apparently neutral studies. Last month, economist Robert Litan ended his affiliation with think tank the Brookings Institution after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized him for failing to adequately disclose that mutual fund behemoth Capital Group had funded one of his papers. Think tank research in Washington has become increasingly suspect as special-interest money has found such validation useful in the lobbying process.

Academic research is broadly considered to have more integrity. But documents shared with HuffPost show that in May 2011, a full six months before the Arkansas Tech paper was published in November, Fusaro emailed Miller to say that he was pushing forward on the revisions Miller had sent him. Miller also provided Fusaro with detailed line edits in July, August and November.