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

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

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

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

On the transferability of three water models developed by adaptive force matching

Water is perhaps the most simulated liquid. Recently three water models have been developed following the adaptive force matching (AFM) method that provides excellent predictions of water properties with only electronic structure information as a reference. Compared to many other electronic structure based force fields that rely on fairly sophisticated energy expressions, the AFM water models use point-charge based energy expressions that are supported by most popular molecular dynamics packages. An outstanding question regarding simple force fields is whether such force fields provide reasonable transferability outside of their conditions of parameterization. A survey of three AFM water models, B3LYPD-4F, BLYPSP-4F, and WAIL are provided for simulations under conditions ranging from the melting point up to the critical point. By including ice-Ih configurations in the training set, the WAIL potential predicts the melting temperate, TM, of ice-Ih correctly. Without training for ice, BLYPSP-4F underestimates TM by about 15 K. Interestingly, the B3LYPD-4F model gives a TM 14 K too high. The overestimation of TM by B3LYPD-4F mostly likely reflects a deficiency of the B3LYP reference. The BLYPSP-4F model gives the best estimate of the boiling temperature TB and is arguably the best potential for simulating water in the temperature range from TM to TB. None of the three AFM potentials provides a good description of the critical point. Although the B3LYPD-4F model gives the correct critical temperature TC and critical density, there are good reasons to believe the agreement is reached fortuitously. Links to Gromacs input files for the three water models are provided at the end of the paper.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figure

The effect of CEO option compensation on the capital structure : a natural experiment

Firms simultaneously choose both their capital and their executive compensation structure. Using the Internal Revenue Code 162(m) tax law as an exogenous shock to compensation structure in a natural experiment setting, I identify firm leverage changes as a result of chief executive officer (CEO) option compensation changes. The evidence provides strong support for debt agency theory. Firms appear to decrease leverage when CEOs are paid with more options and when CEO options become a higher percentage of future cash flows. The findings are robust to controlling for corporate governance and convertible debt

The Ursinus College Investment Management Company Newsletter, Fall 2023

Inside this issue: At a Glance Letter from Kaela Frenchman \u2724 and Olivia DeFusco \u2724 Letter from Jack Thompson \u2724 Honoring Dr. Scott Deacle and Investment Team Updates UCIMCO Investment Performance and Analysis Endowment Outlook Stock Selection Picks Women\u27s Fund Picks Our Teams Thank You! How to Contribute Investment Policy Statement UCIMCO Endowment Investment Policy Statement UCIMCO Stock Selection Investment Policy Statement UCIMCO Women\u27s Fun

Risk and the valuation of the multinational enterprise

Inquires into the effects of multinational involvement have gone in a variety of directions. This research pursues the empirical relationship between a multinational firm\u27s expected returns and market power. Data were collected on a sample of multinational firms and a control sample of domestic firms. Various pricing model tests are conducted for both sets of firms. The market power effect is studied over the time period 1970-1979 and two subperiods, 1970-1974 and 1975-1979. The former subperiod was characterized by foreign investment controls the most notable being the Interest Equalization Tax. The latter subperiod was virtually control free. The results show that for the MNE sample, market power significantly affected expected returns. This result is consistent with two hypotheses raised as a rationale for the multinational enterprise. This market power effect, however is not present for the domestic firm sample. This finding suggests that there may be a link between an firm\u27s expected returns and market power acquired via multinational involvement