Are home prices the next "bubble"?

The strong rise in home prices since the mid-1990s has raised concerns over a possible bubble in the housing market and the effect of a sharp price decline on the U.S. economy. This article assesses two measures frequently cited to support a bubble-the rising price-to-income ratio and the declining rent-to-price ratio-and finds the measures to be flawed and the conclusions drawn from them unpersuasive. In particular, the measures do not fully account for the effects of declining nominal mortgage interest rates and fail to use appropriate home price indexes. The authors also estimate a structural model of the housing market and find that aggregate prices are not inconsistent with long-run demand fundamentals. Accordingly, they conclude that market fundamentals are strong enough to explain the recent path of home prices and that no bubble exists. Nevertheless, weakening fundamentals could have an impact on home values on the east and west coasts, where the new housing supply appears to be relatively inelastic. However, prices in these regions have typically been volatile, and previous declines have not had a sizable negative effect on the overall economy.Housing - Prices ; Housing - Finance ; Business cycles

Monetary policy transmission to residential investment

Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary TransmissionMonetary policy ; Housing - Finance ; Mortgages

The 16-39 micron spectroscopy of oxygen-rich stars

Airborne observations of the 16-39 microns spectra of ten oxygen-rich stars with excess emission in the infrared was obtained. The stars show excess emission attributed to circumstellar dust grains in the 16-39 microns region in the form of a broad hump peaking near 18 microns and falling smoothly to longer wavelengths. The emission is similar in character to the emission from the Trapezium region of the Orion nebula indicating the grain materials are quite similar in these objects. The existence of a feature in the 20 microns region is consistent with the 0-Si-0 bending resonance expected for silicate material. The lack of any sharp structure in the spectra indicates the silicate is in an amorphous, disordered form. A simple model of small grains of carbonaceous chondrite silicate material in a diffuse circumstellar envelope is shown to give a good qualitative fit to the observed 8-39 microns circumstellar spectra. Comparison of the observed spectra with the model spectra indicates the grain emissivity falls as 1/lambda squared from 20 microns to 40 microns

A mathematical morphology approach for a qualitative exploration of drought events in space and time

Drought events occur worldwide and possibly incur severe consequences. Trying to understand and characterize drought events is of considerable importance in order to improve the preparedness for coping with future events. In this paper, we present a methodology that allows for the delineation of drought events by exploiting their spatiotemporal nature. To that end, we apply operators borrowed from mathematical morphology to represent drought events as connected components in space and time. As an illustration, we identify drought events on the basis of a 35-year data set of daily soil moisture values covering mainland Australia. We then extract characteristics reflecting the affected area, duration and intensity from the proposed representation of a drought event in order to illustrate the impact of tuning parameters in the methodology presented. Yet, this paper we refrain from comparing with other drought delineation methods

Risky neighborhoods? House appreciation in underserved areas

This research project will investigate house price appreciation trends in traditionally underserved areas. The primary goal is to develop and test a methodology to determine what part of a home (appreciation)is due to structural and neighborhood effects, and what part may be attributable to other factors such as homeowners actions (including repair, maintenance, and upgrades). We will employ a space-time modeling framework to measure appreciation varying influences of structural and neighborhood, and other factors on appreciation overtime. We will compare appreciation trends across different submarkets (underserved and conventional) and for both high risk and low risk borrowers. The empirical analysis will employ thr TRW-REDI housing transaction data set for Miami MSA (USA) for the 1985-1993 period in conjunction with Census and American Housing Survey (AHS) data.

"Mortgage Default Among Rural, Low-Income Borrowers"

In this working paper, Quercia, McCarthy, and Stegman use data obtained on 874 low income, rural borrowers participating in the Section 502 Home Ownership program administered by the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHA), and apply two multivariate proportional hazard models in order to analyze default decisions among these borrowers over time. The authors cite two key findings relating to default literature: (1) that contrary to prior findings, the size of the mortgage payment relative to borrower income plays a significant part in the default decision; and (2) borrower characteristics traditionally deemed risky (including minority status or being a female head of household) had no significant effect on borrower default. Rather, borrower-related factors--such as a change in marital status or the exodus of children from the household--played a larger part in the default decisions of borrowers participating in the FmHA program.

Market assessment: Proceedings of a seminar held at Lincoln University of Canterbury 16-17 August 1973

Satisfaction of individual and community welfare continues to become more difficult and complex, even without the complication that the natural, human and financial resources which society has to devote to this problem remain scarce. Marketing, in its modern dress, has a significant contribution to make in this area. This is because, put simply, marketing is concerned with satisfying needs and wants of consumers. Of course from the point of view of the business firms such activities need to be profitable. The concern of Lincoln College and SME Canterbury, is that sales and marketing executives periodically be given opportunity to review scientific marketing thought to assist in solving such problems. This lead to the development of the seminar reported here which is the first of an annual series. The major focus was on market assessment. We considered the seminar to be of most benefit to Sales and Marketing Executives and Market Research Specialists in industry, commerce or agriculture, who seek to keep up to date with modern marketing thought and techniques. It provided them with a review of principles and a working knowledge of techniques appropriate for investigating particular marketing problems. Subsequent seminars will use the same approach to look at other marketing problem

Alien Registration- Mccarthy, William W. (Limestone, Aroostook County)

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