Pre-Purchase Counseling Impacts on Mortgage Performance: Empirical Analysis of NeighborWorks America's Experience

NeighborWorks America's (NeighborWorks) nationwide network of affiliates offers pre-purchase homebuyer counseling and education throughout the country. Using information on about 75,000 loans originated between October 2007 and September 2009, Neil Mayer and Associates together with Experian analyzed the impact of pre-purchase counseling and education, provided by NeighborWorks' network, on the performance of counseled borrowers' mortgages. It compares mortgage performance for counseled buyers over two years after the mortgages are originated, compared to mortgage performance of borrowers who receive no such services.The study's findings show that pre-purchase counseling and education works: clients receiving pre-purchase counseling and education from NeighborWorks organizations are one-third less likely to become 90+ days delinquent over the two years after receiving their loan than are borrowers who do not receiving pre-purchase counseling from NeighborWorks organizations. The finding is consistent across years of loan origin, even as the mortgage market changed in a period of financial crisis. It applies equally to first-time homebuyers and repeat buyers

“Phrynichus, Pericles, and Praise”

Thucydides's unusual praise of the Athenian general Phrynichus in 8.27.5 gives insight into how the historian thought and wrote. The praise seems unwarranted in the immediate instance and in light of Phrynichus's subsequent actions. I argue that the praise seems directed at the manner in which Phrynichus made his decisions, and how Thucydides's praise for him parallels his portrait of Pericles

Effect Of Inner Scale Atmospheric Spectrum Models On Scintillation In All Optical Turbulence Regimes

Experimental studies have shown that a bump occurs in the atmospheric spectrum just prior to turbulence cell dissipation.1,3,4 In weak optical turbulence, this bump affects calculated scintillation. The purpose of this thesis was to determine if a non-bump atmospheric power spectrum can be used to model scintillation for plane waves and spherical waves in moderate to strong optical turbulence regimes. Scintillation expressions were developed from an effective von Karman spectrum using an approach similar to that used by Andrews et al.8,14,15 in developing expressions from an effective modified (bump) spectrum. The effective spectrum extends the Rytov approximation into all optical turbulence regimes using filter functions to eliminate mid-range turbulent cell size effects to the scintillation index. Filter cutoffs were established by matching to known weak and saturated scintillation results. The resulting new expressions track those derived from the effective bump spectrum fairly closely. In extremely strong turbulence, differences are minimal

Community Health Centers and Translational Clinical Research: The Fenway Health Experience

This is the Symposium\u27s Keynote presentation by Kenneth Mayer, MD, Medical Research Director and Co-Chair of The Fenway Institute, on the history, services, and research initiatives of Fenway Health, which was founded in 1971 in Boston, Massachusetts. The mission of Fenway Health is to enhance the well being of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community as well as people in our neighborhoods and beyond through access to the highest quality health care, education, research and advocacy

Executive Power in the Obama Administration and the Decision to Seek Congressional Authorization for a Military Attack Against Syria: Implications for Theories of Unilateral Action

The primary axiom of the unilateral-powers literature is that the institutional setting and political incentives that confront presidents push them to seek maximum discretion over policy. The straightforward implication is that presidents will seek control (Terry Moe calls it autonomy)—always contentious given the competitive political authority at the heart of separation of powers, but necessary to them given their interests and position in the political system. Empirically, presidents are expected to (and do) act unilaterally, moving first to put their stamp on policy and process, shape institutional structures, and alter the status quo to shift government outputs toward their preferred position. A corollary is that presidents will not voluntarily surrender the discretion that their institutional position provides and their political interest demands, because doing so leaves their fate in the hands of other actors with very different goals and interests. Unilateral action can increase governability, as the President retains the capacity to function even in the face of gridlock or partisan opposition

The Clinical Spectrum of HIV Infections: Implications for Public Policy

The term acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a definition developed by the Centers for Disease Control to explain the epidemic of immunosuppression first seen in the United States among gay and bisexual men and intravenous drug users in the early 1980s. It is now known that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the necessary agent for the compromise of the immune system which results in AIDS; however, there is a wide range of manifestations associated with HIV infection. Individuals with AIDS tend to have severe opportunistic infections or malignancies, and the vast majority ofindividuals die within two years after the diagnosis. At least a fourth of the individuals with HIV infection in one study were found to remain asymptomatic after seven years of infection. Between the long period of asymptomatic infection and the development of life-threatening opportunistic infections, individuals may develop subacute manifestations of HIV infection. Some individuals may develop constitutional symptoms, without any other medical explanation. The clinical use of tests of immunologic function as well as newer tests that may describe the type of HIV infection, such as the serum antigen test, may enhance the ability of clinicians to give infected patients more specific information as to their prognosis. As newer therapies are developed, the utilization of newer diagnostic tests may allow for staging more rational treatment plans. The data suggesting increasing efficacy of Azidothymidine (AZT), as well as the development of newer chemotherapeutic agents, may lead to more widespread HIV testing in order to detect infection at early stages and intervene with specific therapies. Use of the test as a means of altering behavior remains controversial. The development of newer therapies is hindered by the need to avoid exposing HIV-infected individuals to agents that subsequently turn out to be harmful, such as HPA-23 and Suramin. But this must be balanced with the urgent need of individuals to try promising therapeutic agents. Preliminary data suggest that individuals who are treated with AZT at earlier stages of HIV infection may do better; thus, there may be a move in the future to treat people with AZT. The clinical dilemma will persist for some time to come, and the cost of care for individuals with AIDS and HIV infection will be extremely high. Although the illness is frequently fatal, it is most appropriate to be considerate of the individual\u27s desire to have more aggressive therapies, given the variability of HIV infection for each person and the fact that new therapeutic breakthroughs are being made every day

National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Evaluation: Final Report, Rounds 1 and 2

The National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program is a special federal appropriation, administered by NeighborWorks (NW) America, to support a rapid expansion of foreclosure intervention counseling in response to the nationwide foreclosure crisis. As this is a federal appropriation, NW America must inform Congress and other entities of the NFMC program's progress. The Urban Institute (UI) was selected by NW America to evaluate the NFMC program. This report presents the final results from UI's evaluation of the first two rounds of the NFMC program (people receiving counseling in 2008 and 2009), including a detailed analysis of program outcomes first described in preliminary reports of November 2009 (Mayer et al.) and December 2010 (Mayer et al.). According to those reports, homeowners receiving NFMC counseling avoided entering foreclosure, successfully cured existing foreclosures, and obtained more favorable loan modifications. This report updates previous analyses and also includes revised models of several homeowner outcomes for NFMC clients counseled in 2008 and 2009. These new models use an improved comparison sample selection design, which addressed potential issues raised by reviewers of earlier analyses, and a better method for controlling for possible selection bias in the NFMC sample. The additional analyses in this report include models of non-modification cures, non-modification redefaults, and foreclosures avoided

National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Evaluation: Final Report, Rounds 3 Through 5

The Urban Institute completed a four-year evaluation of Rounds 3 through 5 of the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program. Using a representative NFMC sample of 137,000 loans and a comparison non-NFMC sample of 103,000 loans, the Urban Institute was able to employ robust statistical techniques to isolate the impact of NFMC counseling on loan performance through June 2013.The final evaluation of Rounds 3 through 5 conducted by Urban Institute indicates that the NFMC program continues to have positive effects for homeowners participating in the program Counseled homeowners were more likely to cure a serious delinquency or foreclosure with a modification or other type cure, stay current after obtaining a cure, and for NFMC clients who cured a serious delinquency, avoid foreclosure altogether

Immune Reconstitution in HIV-Infected Patients

The prognosis of patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1 has dramatically improved since the advent of potent antiretroviral therapies (ARTs), which have enabled sustained suppression of HIV replication and recovery of CD4 T cell counts. Knowledge of the function of CD4 T cells in immune reconstitution was derived from large clinical studies demonstrating that primary and secondary prophylaxis against infectious agents, such as Pneumocystis jirovecii (Pneumocystis carinii), Mycobacterium avium complex, cytomegalovirus, and other pathogens, can be discontinued safely once CD4 T cell counts have increased beyond pathogen-specific threshold levels (usually >200 CD4 T cells/mm3) for 3-6 months. The downside of immune reconstitution is an inflammatory syndrome occurring days to months after the start of ART, with outcomes ranging from minimal morbidity to fatal progression. This syndrome can be elicited by infectious and noninfectious antigens. Microbiologically, the possible pathogenic pathways involve recognition of antigens associated with ongoing infection or recognition of persisting antigens associated with past (nonreplicating) infection. Specific antimicrobial therapy, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and/or steroids for managing immune reconstitution syndrome should be considere