New information reported under HMDA and its application in fair lending enforcement

In 2002 the Federal Reserve Board amended its Regulation C, which implements the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, to expand the types of information that lenders covered by the law must disclose to the public about their home-lending activities. The amendments are intended to improve the quality, consistency, and utility of the reported data and to keep the regulation in step with recent developments in home-loan markets. Data reported for 2004 are the first to reflect the changes in the reporting rules. ; This article presents a first look at these greatly expanded data and considers some of their implications for the continuing concerns about fair lending. The analysis highlights some key relationships revealed in an initial review of the types of data that are new for 2004. Some parts of the analysis focus on nationwide statistics, and others examine patterns across groups of lenders, loan products, and various groupings of applicants, borrowers, and neighborhoods. The authors explore, in particular and in some depth, the strengths and limitations of the information on loan pricing. They also describe how the new data are being used to enhance fair lending enforcement activities.Regulation C: Home Mortgage Disclosure ; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

The 2009 HMDA data: the mortgage market in a time of low interest rates and economic distress

Mortgages ; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

The Role of the World Bank in Controlling Corruption

In 1997, Professor of Law and Political Science, Susan Rose-Ackerman of Yale University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s seventeenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: The World Bank’s Role in Controlling Corruption. Susan Rose-Ackerman is Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University, and Co-director of the Law School’s Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Fullbright Commission. She was a visiting Research Fellow at the World Bank in 1995-96 where she did research on corruption and economic development. She is the author of Corruption and Government Causes, Consequences and Reform (1999), Controlling Environmental Policy: The Limits of Public Law in Germany and the United States (1995); Rethinking the Progressive Agenda: The Reform of the American Regulatory State (1992); and Corruption: A Study in Political Economy (1978); and joint author of The Uncertain Search for Environmental Quality (1974) and The Nonprofit Enterprise in Market Economies (1986). She has published widely in law, economics, and policy journals. Her research interests include comparative regulatory law and policy, the political economy of corruption, public policy and administrative law, and law and economics. In this essay Professor Rose-Ackerman discuses how widespread corruption is a symptom that the state is functioning poorly. Ineffective states can retard and misdirect economic growth. International aid and lending organizations have begun to focus on corruption control as part of a general rethinking of their role in the post-Cold War world. Both James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank (Bank), and Michel Camdessus, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have put the control of corruption on their institutions\u27 agendas. Nevertheless, some argue that corruption is a political issue and is, therefore, outside the purview of the World Bank. Corruption, however, has fundamental economic impacts and is thus an appropriate area for World Bank and IMF concern. Bribes represent illegal user fees, taxes, or access charges paid to public agents. These payments influence economic decisions ranging from the size and character of public investment projects to the level of compliance with business regulations. It is difficult to see how a concern for the economic costs of corruption can be responsibly excluded from World Bank lending criteria

USING ECONOMIC INCENTIVES TO CONTROL POLLUTION IN RUSSIA

This paper investigates Russia's system of environmental management, especially economic tools used to control pollution. It also describes the Russian experience with a system of pollution fees. In particular, we consider how the system of pollution fees works, how fee levels are set, the incentive properties of the fees, and the ultimate use to the Russian government of the revenue from the emission fees. Although the emission fees are quite substantial for some pollutants, the incentive properties of the fees are almost nonexistent. The primary purpose of pollution fees is to generate funds for state-owned enterprises to invest in pollution abatement equipment. This is substantially different from the operation of a pollution fee in the West.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Strict Liability as a Deterrent in Toxic Waste Management: Empirical Evidence from Accident and Spill Data

This paper explores the issue of whether strict liability imposed on polluters has served to reduce uncontrolled releases of toxics into the environment. Strict liability should create additional incentives for firms to handle hazardous substances more carefully, thus reducing the future likelihood of uncontrolled releases of toxics. However, the size of these incentives may vary according to the size of a firm's assets, since asset size is the ultimate limit on a firm's liability. We are therefore interested to see whether imposing strict liability for the cost of remediation at hazardous waste sites has encouraged firms to handle toxic materials more carefully and has uniformly reduced the incidence of toxic spills, or whether the effect is dependent on firm size and other factors. To answer these questions, we exploit the variation in state hazardous waste site laws across states and over time. We use data on accidents and spills involving hazardous substances coming from a comprehensive database of events reported to the US EPA under their Emergency Response Notification System (ERNS), and fit regressions relating the frequency of spills of selected chemicals used in manufacturing to the type of liability in force in a state. We control for the extent of manufacturing activity in the state, and include in the regression other program features that might alter firms' expected outlays in the event of an accident, and thus affect firms' incentives to take care. Results vary with the chemical being analyzed. For some chemicals, such as halogenated solvents, the presence of strict liability does not provide any additional explanatory power for the number of spills beyond what is achieved by the number of establishments and the sectoral composition of manufacturing. For other families of chemicals (acids, ammonia and chlorine), we find that the impacts of manufacturing activities on the number of spills in each state do vary systematically with the liability regime. In particular, it appears that under strict liability small firms are responsible for a disproportionate number of spills. Since strict liability states tend to have more manufacturing firms, and more small manufacturing firms, these factors serve to increase the number of spills of these chemicals in strict liability states.

Impact identification strategies for evaluating business incentive programs.

Although business incentive programs of different forms have been the bulk of local economic development policies in many industrialized countries for more than the last three decades, evaluating their impact on employment or local economic growth outcomes remains a challenging task due to the persisting lack of randomized experiments and the presence of many confounding factors which affect firms and economic growth outcomes. Moreover, much of the recent advancements in the statistical program evaluation methodology applicable to non-experimental settings do not make any direct reference to the specificities posed by business incentive policies. This paper aims at offering some clear guidance on how to choose the appropriate focus of the evaluation, the policy relevant evaluation parameters and empirical impact identification strategies when applying statistical methods attempting to estimate how much of the different outcomes between treatment and control groups are attributable to the program/s being evaluated. Each methodological option discussed in the paper is linked to the different features of commonly implemented US and EU policies and to whether or not the analysis focuses on outcomes recorded at a firm-level or at the level of the geographic areas in which the assisted firms are located.Impact evaluation, Business Incentives Policies; Comparison-group designs, Identification strategies