Determinants of the Closing Probability of Residential Mortgage Applications

After allowing applicants to "lock" the interest rate, mortgage originators are concerned with protecting themselves from adverse outcomes due to interest-rate changes. One may expect applicants would strive to close applications when rates rose, while letting themselves fall out when rates decline. Our results show that applicant response to interest-rate changes and volatility are modest. The most important predictor of closing probability is the length of the lock period, with shorter locks being more likely to close. Applications for single-family are more likely to close than are those for multiunit dwellings. Applications for owner-occupied properties are more likely to close than are those for investment properties. Applicant characteristics such as loan affordability, education and age have a small influence on closing rate. Gender has an effect for some loan programs, and marital status appears to be irrelevant. Discount points affect refinance mortgages more than purchase mortgages. Conventional applications are more likely to close than FHA and VA, and applications for refinance, in general, are less likely to close. Results are mixed for ARM and fifteen-year applications, as well as for whether it was the original application, or a relock.

The Influence of Race in Residential Mortgage Closings

This study examines how applicants identified as Asian, Black or Hispanic differ in mortgage closing outcomes compared to the remaining applicants. First, the findings show that minority applicants are somewhat less likely to close a loan for purchase, but equally likely to close a loan for refinance. A more important question this study addresses is whether minority borrowers have less efficient closing outcomes. The findings show no statistical difference between minority and non-minority applicants. This indicates that originators do not demonstrate a ‘‘taste for discrimination’’ by basing their loan approval for minorities on whether the loan can be profitably sold.

Optimal strategies for regional cultivar testing

In undertaking cultivar trials, the variability of the response of the cultivars to the different environments in which they are grown introduces the possibility of release errors and non‐release errors in the decisions made on the basis of the trial results. In this article a model is developed that accounts for the economic costs of those errors as well as the costs of operating the trials, and enables the features of the optimal cultivar testing program to be identified. The model is illustrated by application to wheat cultivar trials in central and southern NSW.Crop Production/Industries,

Complete characterization of ultrashort pulse sources at 1550 nm

This paper reviews the use of frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) to characterize mode-locked lasers producing ultrashort pulses suitable for high-capacity optical communications systems at wavelengths around 1550 nm, Second harmonic generation (SHG) FROG is used to characterize pulses from a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser, and both single-mode and dual-mode gain-switched semiconductor lasers. The compression of gain-switched pulses in dispersion compensating fiber is also studied using SHG-FROG, allowing optimal compression conditions to be determined without a priori assumptions about pulse characteristics. We also describe a fiber-based FROG geometry exploiting cross-phase modulation and show that it is ideally suited to pulse characterization at optical communications wavelengths. This technique has been used to characterize picosecond pulses with energy as low as 24 pJ, giving results in excellent agreement with SHG-FROG characterization, and without any temporal ambiguity in the retrieved puls

Child relationships in the middle grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit