Mortgage Broker Regulations That Matter: Analyzing Earnings, Employment, and Outcomes for Consumers

As the role of mortgage brokers in mortgage origination grew from insignificant in the 1980s to dominant in recent years, questions have arisen about whether its services help or harm consumers. In response, states have increasingly regulated the business, largely by creating and tightening occupational licensing requirements for mortgage brokers. The question of whether increased occupational licensing of mortgage brokers improves consumer outcomes is theoretically ambiguous and has been little studied empirically. This study introduces a new database of mortgage broker licensing requirements and assesses the relationships between these requirements and outcomes in both the labor market for brokers and the consumer market for mortgages. We find that one typical regulation—the requirement in many states that mortgage brokers maintain a surety bond or minimum net worth—has a significant and fairly consistent statistical relationship with both labor and consumer market outcomes. In particular, we find that tighter bonding/net worth requirements are associated with slightly higher broker earnings, fewer brokers, fewer subprime mortgages, higher foreclosure rates, and a greater percentage of high-interest-rate mortgages. Although we do not provide a full causal interpretation of these results, we take seriously the possibility that restrictive bonding requirements for mortgage brokers have unintended negative consequences for many consumers. On balance, our results also seem to support the relevance of theories of occupational licensing that stress the importance of financial entry and exit barriers.

Information acquisition and financial contagion.

This paper incorporates costly voluntary acquisition of information à la Nikitin and Smith (2007) [Nikitin, M., Smith, R.T., 2007. Information acquisition, coordination, and fundamentals in a financial crisis. Journal of Banking and Finance, in press, doi:10.1016/j.jbankfin.2007.04.031], in a framework similar to Allen and Gale (2000) [Allen, F., Gale, D., 2000. Financial contagion. Journal of Political Economy 108, 1–33], without relying on any unexpected shock to model contagion. In this framework, contagion and financial crises are the result of information gathering by depositors, weak fundamentals and an incomplete market structure of banks. It also shows how financial systems entering a recession can affect others with apparently stronger economic conditions (contagion). Finally, this is the first paper to investigate the effectiveness of the Contingent Credit Line procedures, introduced by the IMF at the end of the nineties, as a mechanism to prevent the propagation of crises.Central Bank; Contingent credit line; Financial contagion; Fundamentals; Verification equilibrium;

MDI Tomorrow 2003 Community Survey

This report presents the results of a survey of MDI area residents conducted during December 2003 and January 2004. In addition, the report presents the methods used in conducting the survey and recommendations for future action

Longer careers: A barrier to hiring and coworker advancement?

Government policies are encouraging older workers to delay retirement, which may curb younger workers' career advancement. We study a Dutch reform that raised the retirement age by 13 months and nearly tripled employment at age 66. Using monthly linked employeremployee data, we show that affected firms delay and decrease replacement hiring, and coworkers' earnings fall via reductions in hours worked, wages, and promotions. Combined, the hiring and coworker spillovers offset most of the additional hours worked by older workers, disproportionately affect career advancement for younger workers and women, and considerably increase the policy's ratio of welfare costs to fiscal savings

Combinatorial Characterizations of K-matrices

We present a number of combinatorial characterizations of K-matrices. This extends a theorem of Fiedler and Ptak on linear-algebraic characterizations of K-matrices to the setting of oriented matroids. Our proof is elementary and simplifies the original proof substantially by exploiting the duality of oriented matroids. As an application, we show that a simple principal pivot method applied to the linear complementarity problems with K-matrices converges very quickly, by a purely combinatorial argument.Comment: 17 pages; v2, v3: clarified proof of Thm 5.5, minor correction

A Quantitative Analysis and Natural History of B. F. Skinner’s Coauthoring Practices

This is the published version, reproduced here with permission from the publisher. This article is also available electronically form http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22532732.This paper describes and analyzes B. F. Skinner's coauthoring practices. After identifying his 35 coauthored publications and 27 coauthors, we analyze his coauthored works by their form (e.g., journal articles) and kind (e.g., empirical); identify the journals in which he published and their type (e.g., data-type); describe his overall and local rates of publishing with his coauthors (e.g., noting breaks in the latter); and compare his coauthoring practices with his single-authoring practices (e.g., form, kind, journal type) and with those in the scientometric literature (e.g., majority of coauthored publications are empirical). We address these findings in the context of describing the natural history of Skinner's coauthoring practices. Finally, we describe some limitations in our methods and offer suggestions for future research

Economic and Fiscal Impacts of Proposed LNG Facility in Robbinston, Maine

The purpose of this study is to examine the economic and fiscal impacts of the proposed Downeast LNG facility on the Town of Robbinston, Washington County, and the State of Maine. The economic impact analysis focuses on the employment and income that are associated with the LNG facility construction and operations. The fiscal impact analysis considers additional local and state tax revenues associated with the facility, as well as increased local government expenditures that are projected to result from the LNG project. This report does not address the environmental, homeland security, or energy security impacts of the LNG facility. In addition, this report does not estimate any changes in the price of delivered natural gas in Maine that could potentially result from a new major energy supplier