Prepayment Behavior of Dutch Mortgagors: An Empirical Analysis

The booming Dutch mortgage market and the development of a promising secondary mortgage market in the Netherlands stress the need for an accurate mortgage prepayment model that incorporates typical Dutch market and contract characteristics.One of those typical Dutch features prescribes that each calendar year the mortgagor is allowed to prepay penalty-free 10 to 20 percent of the original loan amount.As a consequence, Dutch mortgagees suffer a loss when borrowers prepay their loans.This risk, once again, underlines the importance of a prepayment model that focuses on the Dutch market.To derive such model we use historical data on mortgages originated between January 1989 and June 1999.We estimate separate models for two popular redemption types: savings mortgages and interest-only mortgages.In both models we allow for suboptimal prepayment behaviour.The results clearly indicate that prepayment rates depend on interest rates and the age of the mortgage contract.Moreover, Dutch prepayment rates peak in the month December.mortgages;econometric models

Prepayment Behavior of Dutch Mortgagors:An Empirical Analysis

The booming Dutch mortgage market and the development of a promising secondary mortgage market in the Netherlands stress the need for an accurate mortgage prepayment model that incorporates typical Dutch market and contract characteristics.One of those typical Dutch features prescribes that each calendar year the mortgagor is allowed to prepay penalty-free 10 to 20 percent of the original loan amount.As a consequence, Dutch mortgagees suffer a loss when borrowers prepay their loans.This risk, once again, underlines the importance of a prepayment model that focuses on the Dutch market.To derive such model we use historical data on mortgages originated between January 1989 and June 1999.We estimate separate models for two popular redemption types: savings mortgages and interest-only mortgages.In both models we allow for suboptimal prepayment behaviour.The results clearly indicate that prepayment rates depend on interest rates and the age of the mortgage contract.Moreover, Dutch prepayment rates peak in the month December.

Numerical simulation of transitional flow on a wind turbine airfoil with RANS-based transition model

This paper presents a numerical investigation of transitional flow on the wind turbine airfoil DU91-W2-250 with chord-based Reynolds number Rec = 1.0 × 106. The Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes based transition model using laminar kinetic energy concept, namely the k − kL − ω model, is employed to resolve the boundary layer transition. Some ambiguities for this model are discussed and it is further implemented into OpenFOAM-2.1.1. The k − kL − ω model is first validated through the chosen wind turbine airfoil at the angle of attack (AoA) of 6.24° against wind tunnel measurement, where lift and drag coefficients, surface pressure distribution and transition location are compared. In order to reveal the transitional flow on the airfoil, the mean boundary layer profiles in three zones, namely the laminar, transitional and fully turbulent regimes, are investigated. Observation of flow at the transition location identifies the laminar separation bubble. The AoA effect on boundary layer transition over wind turbine airfoil is also studied. Increasing the AoA from −3° to 10°, the laminar separation bubble moves upstream and reduces in size, which is in close agreement with wind tunnel measurement

Helping to overcome intervention inertia in Bystander’s dilemmas: behavioral disinhibition can improve the greater good

Conventional wisdom holds that behavioral disinhibition has negative effects on what humans do. Behavioral disinhibition may indeed frequently have negative effects, but in the present paper we reveal some positive consequences as well: The disinhibition hypothesis proposed here states that people may feel inhibited to intervene in situations in which non-intervening bystanders are present and that, therefore, behavioral disinhibition may help to overcome the bystander effect. Findings presented here provide evidence supporting this prediction both inside and outside the psychology laboratory: In both real-life and controlled bystander situations, people were more likely and faster to provide help when (unrelated to the bystander situations) they had (vs. had not) been reminded about having acted with no inhibitions. These findings suggest that, in contrast with what various theories and worldviews dictate, behavioral disinhibition may have positive effects on helping behavior and hence can be conducive for the greater good

Rapid Mixing for Lattice Colorings with Fewer Colors

We provide an optimally mixing Markov chain for 6-colorings of the square lattice on rectangular regions with free, fixed, or toroidal boundary conditions. This implies that the uniform distribution on the set of such colorings has strong spatial mixing, so that the 6-state Potts antiferromagnet has a finite correlation length and a unique Gibbs measure at zero temperature. Four and five are now the only remaining values of q for which it is not known whether there exists a rapidly mixing Markov chain for q-colorings of the square lattice.Comment: Appeared in Proc. LATIN 2004, to appear in JSTA