Essays on Mortgage Choice and Housing Economics

This dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters that study various interactions between the housing market, mortgage choice, and public policy. The first chapter studies how changes to the collateral value of real estate assets affect homeowner borrowing. While previous research has documented a positive relationship between house prices and home-equity based borrowing, a key empirical challenge has been to disentangle the role of collateral constraints from that of wealth effects in generating this relationship. To isolate the role of collateral constraints, I exploit the fully anticipated expiration of resale price controls created through an inclusionary zoning regulation in Montgomery County, Maryland. I estimate that the marginal propensity to borrow out of increases in housing collateral is between $0.04 and$0.13. The magnitude of this effect is correlated with a homeowner\u27s initial leverage and additional analysis of residential investment and ex-post loan performance further suggests that borrowers used some portion of the extracted funds to finance current consumption and investment expenditures. These results highlight the importance of collateral constraints for homeowner borrowing and suggest a potentially important role for house price growth in driving aggregate consumption. The second chapter, co-authored with Andrew Paciorek, provides novel estimates of the interest rate elasticity of mortgage demand by measuring the extent to which households bunch at a discrete jump in interest rates generated by the conforming loan limit. Our estimates imply that a 1 percentage point increase in the rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage reduces first mortgage demand by between 2 and 3 percent. One-third of this response is driven by borrowers who take out second mortgages, which implies that total mortgage debt only declines by 1.5 to 2 percent. The third chapter, co-authored with Joseph Gyourko, Fernando Ferreira, and Wenjie Ding, uses extensive micro data to investigate whether contagion was an important factor in the last housing cycle. Our estimates provide evidence of contagion during the housing boom, but not during the bust. We also find that contagion effects are greater when transmitted from a larger to a smaller market, and are more important for the most elastically-supplied markets. Local fundamentals and expectations of future fundamentals have limited ability to account for our estimated effect

Aspects of Climate Change

Climate change continues to become a global issue, and with that, more people being affected by the harmful factors that come with it. Climate change not only effects the environment, but also has aspects of cultural and health issues. Different cultures view this problem differently than other as it affects different aspects of that culture. Health risk is on the rise as air pollution is more prominent and diseases spread. The climate is being warmed, causing extreme weather and drought. These different perspectives on global warming allow for new and unknowing people to be exposed to this issue and allow for innovations in combating climate change. It is urgent that people become aware of this wicked problem as it expands globally

Fatal Remedies: Child Sexual Abuse and Education Policy in Liberia

An unintended consequence of international education policy is the misunderstanding of the relation between child sexual abuse and the schooling of girls. Development research indicates that education is associated with decreased rates of early childhood marriage. Yet education also exposes female pupils to sexual violence within schools. International agencies and national governments are often unaware that the very policy of putting young girls in the classroom may also expose them to various forms of child sexual abuse. The relation between schooling and sexual violence has not been well established in development research. The field research reported in this dissertation addresses this deficiency in the literature by examining the joint effects of education and the safety of the school environment on female child sexual abuse. Applying a mixed-methods approach, the study analyses results of a 2018 field-study using a stratified-cluster sample of 715 young Liberian women and 493 of their parents. A key finding of the study is the unintended consequence that sending girls to school is linked to nearly 35 percent of students being statutorily raped. While most child rape offenders work outside of the educational setting, approximately 38 percent of abuse cases involve teachers, staff, and adult students. The analysis further examines how the relation between education and child sexual abuse is affected by factors including the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of parents. Conclusively, the combination of higher educational achievement (e.g. university, advanced polytechnic schools) and safer learning environments significantly reduces abuse risks. For instance, a girl’s odds of being raped are nearly three times less if she has tertiary education versus primary schooling (phi=0.24, p=0.01). Additionally, a small increase in school safety level reduces her risk of being raped by about 10 percent (p=0.001). Statistical findings were interpreted in light of sixteen key informant interviews, which helped explore causal mechanisms and potential policy solutions. The ethical and policy-relevant ramifications of this research expose a fatal remedy: Policymakers are urging girls to enter the classroom at higher rates, yet without fully understanding how to ensure their protection and facilitate their human agency

Hardships, Motivations, and Resiliency: Case Study of Health Implications of 2022 Russian Invasion on Ukrainian Resistance Members

The 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine caused millions of Ukrainians to flee. Yet most citizens continue to reside in the country, playing critical roles in the Ukrainian resistance. Today the Ukrainian fighting force includes trained military and police as well as citizens who either were conscripted or volunteered to take part in national war efforts. This mixed-method study conducted in Spring 2022 presents data collected from 79 respondents in a semistructured survey, using snowball sampling. Data analysis examined individual self-reported motivations, attitudes toward the conflict, resilience, quality-of-life hardships, and scaled perceived stress. Results indicated that Ukrainian resistance members face extreme physical threats, are displaced, separated from family, and experience high levels of stress, especially anxiety, sadness, and anger. Yet individuals tend to experience significantly less overall Perceived Symptoms Scale symptoms if they have intrinsic motivations linked to patriotic ideologies, altruism, and preventing genocide. Bootstrap regression modeling indicates that familial relationship with their nation reduces symptoms by approximately 13%. Comparatively, being extensively separated from family is linked to 21% higher stress. These motivations appear to provide a sense of purpose and source of resiliency despite the health risks associated with resisting a full-scale foreign invasion. My purpose with this article is to represent respondents’ motivations and experiences during the war and to help inform future public health policy and program services that many Ukrainians may need to recover

Tribological Analysis of Hydrophobic Thin Film with Antimicrobial Properties

Silica based sol gel thin films have become a very popular area of research due to their high degree of variability and ease of manufacturing. They are commonly used as coatings for many applications in the consumer electronics and automotive industries. Some common properties in these thin films include optical transparency, wear resistance, antimicrobial, hydrophobic, electromagnetic, etc.;The coating produced in this research has been tailored to meet three key functions; durability, hydrophobicity, and anti-microbial properties. This coating is created through a three-step sol gel reaction mechanism. The starting chemical, tetraethoxysilane (TEOS), yields the final product of a silicon dioxide matrix. During the reaction process, other functional chemicals, including quarternary ammonium salts to increase antimicrobial properties, are incorporated to achieve the desired properties. The sol is then dip coated on to a substrate, glass microscope slide, and then used for further testing.;Testing of these coatings included contact angle analysis to measure the degree of hydrophobicity, reciprocating wear to test the durability of the coating, stylus profilometery to measure the total coating thickness and coating loss as a function of wear, and cell culture studies to determine the efficacy of the anti-microbial agent

Mutual Fund Tournaments: Evidence From Global And International Funds

For a sample of global and international equity mutual funds, we test the proposition that managers likely to end up as losers manipulate fund risk differently from interim winners. In contrast with Brown, Harlow, and Starks (1996) who found robust support for the tournament model, we found no evidence of tournament like behavior for international and global mutual funds. A possible explanation of this behavior is that investors in these funds are primarily seeking diversification and therefore are less sensitive to relative performance

Experiencing Azeroth: a narrative inquiry into playing the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (mmorpg) World of Warcraft

In this thesis I explore the following question: what are players experiencing in World of Warcraft? I examine this question through narrative inquiry. I begin by looking at the history of the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) and factors that have influenced their widespread success. I then move into my research rationale and gaming literature review. Next, I look at literature surrounding ideas on reality and virtual reality as I discuss my ontology (social constructionism) and epistemology (interpretivism). I also look at literature on ludology, narrative and fantasy narratives and how they are relevant in understanding and interpreting human experience as I move into my methodology (narrative inquiry) and methods (computer mediated semi-structured interview). I relay my participants’ narrative accounts through reconstructed tales, each of which highlights a specific trope that captures the sense of the narrative as I have interpreted it. I touch upon why fantasy narratives can be particularly conducive for personal exploration and understanding experience, whether through literature or gaming. I link my participants narratives to existing literature on experiences of gameplay to shed light on the complex and unique relationships people experience with (and within) MMORPGs. The goal of this thesis is to broaden understanding on the experience of online gaming and the role it can play in people’s lives, which is highly relevant to the field of psychotherapy. Through my participants’ stories I strive to understand and convey the complexities of their experiences, including the sense of joy, friendship, love, loss, and accomplishment that was discovered in this strange and wonderful digital landscape. It is my hope to contribute my work to the therapeutic body of knowledge

Many body interactions of neutral and charged hydrogen bonded clusters

Water clusters play a pivotal role in many chemical and biological processes. Understanding the molecular-level interactions between water molecules will greatly improve our understanding of these processes. Using high-level ab initio methods, a new classical force field model for water that accurately describes intermolecular interactions has been developed. This force field has been implemented as part of our Drude Model approach to study excess electron interactions with water clusters. The resulting potentials provide a description of neutral and anionic water clusters close to that obtained by much more computationally demanding high-level ab initio electronic structure calculations

The Role of Contagion in the Last American Housing Cycle

Using proprietary micro data on the complete set of housing transactions between 1993 and 2009 in 99 metropolitan areas, we investigate whether contagion was an important factor in the last housing cycle. We define contagion as the price correlation between two different housing markets following a shock to one market that is above and beyond that which can be justified by common aggregate trends. Our estimates deal with the following empirical challenges: (a) defining the timing of local housing booms in a non-ad hoc way; (b) addressing specification search bias that arises when only one aggregate series is used to estimate both the timing of the housing boom and the magnitude of price volatility during that period; and (c) controlling for common variation in economic conditions. We find strong evidence of contagion during the housing boom, but not during the bust. These effects appear to arise mostly from the closest neighboring metropolitan area, with the price elasticity ranging from 0.10 to 0.27. This is large enough to account for up to 30% of the jump in prices at the beginning of local booms, on average. Estimated elasticities are greater when transmitted from a larger to a smaller market, and also more important for the most elastically-supplied markets. Finally, local fundamentals and expectations of future fundamentals have very limited ability to account for our estimated effect, suggesting a potential role for non-rational forces

Solvent-Induced Shifts in Electronic Spectra of Uracil

Highly accurate excitation spectra are predicted for the low-lying n−π* and π−π* states of uracil for both the gas phase and in water employing the complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF) and multiconfigurational quasidegenerate perturbation theory (MCQDPT) methods. Implementation of the effective fragment potential (EFP) solvent method with CASSCF and MCQDPT enables the prediction of highly accurate solvated spectra, along with a direct interpretation of solvent shifts in terms of intermolecular interactions between solvent and solute. Solvent shifts of the n−π* and π−π* excited states arise mainly from a change in the electrostatic interaction between solvent and solute upon photoexcitation. Polarization (induction) interactions contribute about 0.1 eV to the solvent-shifted excitation. The blue shift of the n−π* state is found to be 0.43 eV and the red shift of the π−π* state is found to be −0.26 eV. Furthermore, the spectra show that in solution the π−π* state is 0.4 eV lower in energy than the n−π* state