H.R. 200, the Helping Families Save Their Homes in Bankruptcy Act of 2009, and H.R. 225, the Emergency Homeownership and Equity Protection Act : Hearing Before the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 111th Cong., Jan. 22, 2009 (Statement of Associate Professor Adam J. Levitin, Geo. U. L. Center)

Permitting modification of all mortgages in bankruptcy would create a low-cost, effective, fair, and immediately available method for resolving much of the current foreclosure crisis without imposing costs on taxpayers, creating a moral hazard for borrowers or lenders, or increasing mortgage credit costs or decreasing mortgage credit availability. As the foreclosure crisis deepens, bankruptcy modification presents the best and least invasive method of stabilizing the housing market and is a crucial step in stabilizing financial markets

Money for Nothing: The Sin of Usury

I present an overview of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on usury. In 1515, the Fifth Lateran Council defined “the real meaning of usury: when, from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk.” I argue that the economic conditions of the Middle Ages could not have justified any interest, but structural changes to the economy, including the abolition of slavery, inflation, and the emergence of markets for investment, justify interest on the basis of default risk, the costs of inflation, and opportunity costs.usury, commutative justice, Catholicism

Incentives to Issue Low-Quality Securitized Products in the OTD Business Model

We consider an economy in which a lender finances loans to borrowers by issuing a securitized product to investors and in which the credit quality of the product can depend on whether the lender screens borrowers. In the presence of asymmetric information between the lender and investors regarding the credit quality of potential borrowers, overvaluation from the lender's perspective can occur for low-quality securitized products, which inefficiently induces the lender not to screen borrowers and hence to issue the securitized products of low credit quality. This is likely to occur when the probability of being in a bad state (i.e., the presence of low-quality borrowers) is low, or when the seeds of recession begin emerging in a booming economy.Originate-to-distribute, Securitization, Asymmetric information, Screening, Verification

Life of occam-Pi

This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an “advanced” subject? What’s the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockham’s Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoare’s CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milner’s ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation – occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future

The Impact of Technology and Regulation on the Geographical Scope of Banking

We review how technological advances and changes in regulation may shape the (future) geographical scope of banking. We first review how both physical distance and the presence of borders currently affect bank lending conditions (loan pricing and credit availability) and market presence (branching and servicing). Next we discuss how technology and regulation have altered this impact and analyse the current state of the European banking sector. We discuss both theoretical contributions and empirical work and highlight open questions along the way. We draw three main lessons from the current theoretical and empirical literature: (1) Bank lending to small businesses in Europe may be characterized both by (local) spatial pricing and resilient (regional and/or national) market segmentation; (2) Because of informational asymmetries in the retail market, bank mergers and acquisitions seem the optimal route of entering another market, long before cross-border servicing or direct entry are economically feasible; (3) Current technological and regulatory developments may to a large extent remain impotent in further dismantling the various residual but mutually reinforcing frictions in the retail banking markets in Europe. We conclude the paper by offering pertinent policy recommendations based on these three lessons.geographical scope, banking, lending relationships, technology, and regulation.

Using Multi-Sense Vector Embeddings for Reverse Dictionaries

Popular word embedding methods such as word2vec and GloVe assign a single vector representation to each word, even if a word has multiple distinct meanings. Multi-sense embeddings instead provide different vectors for each sense of a word. However, they typically cannot serve as a drop-in replacement for conventional single-sense embeddings, because the correct sense vector needs to be selected for each word. In this work, we study the effect of multi-sense embeddings on the task of reverse dictionaries. We propose a technique to easily integrate them into an existing neural network architecture using an attention mechanism. Our experiments demonstrate that large improvements can be obtained when employing multi-sense embeddings both in the input sequence as well as for the target representation. An analysis of the sense distributions and of the learned attention is provided as well

The role of role theory in International Political Economy

This article demonstrates the benefits of using a role theory approach in the field of International Political Economy (IPE) by demonstrating the benefits of role theory relative to variants of the social constructivist paradigm, especially vis-à-vis identity based accounts of IPE. This article also documents why and how role theory has always had a home in IPE even before the constructivist revolution in the 1990s. The social interactionist dimension in the work of Herbert Mead and his notion of a general other are linked to the relational ideas of friendship and impartial spectator present in the works of the founding father of classical political economy, Adam Smith. These similar ideas about the self and their surrounding social environment is a useful starting point to locate role theory in IPE and demonstrate its analytical advantages within social constructivism. After showing the “forgotten” place role theory has always had in IPE, the article illustrates the potential of using a role theory approach within the field of IPE through an illustrative analysis of the Greek economic crisis