Have the trends in housing bottomed out?

On a national level, the number of vacant homes is declining, as is the percentage of mortgages in serious delinquency. However, the demand for housing hasn't picked up, nor have prices.Housing ; Housing - Prices

Some closure on foreclosures?

Contrary to popular perception, the foreclosure process can be very costly for a lender…it remains a puzzle as to why such large numbers of mortgages in default enter into foreclosure in the first place.Foreclosure ; Housing ; Mortgages

Is shadow banking really banking?

To those who don't know, the term "shadow banking" probably has a negative connotation. This primer draws parallels between what has been termed the shadow banking sector and the traditional banking sector—showing that they are similar in many ways.Banks and banking ; Financial risk management ; Financial crises

Changes in the mortgage market since the crisis

It appears that mortgage origination and securitization is currently “in limbo”: Private securitization has all but disappeared and is being absorbed by government- sponsored enterprisesMortgages ; Mortgage loans

A closer look at house price indexes

At least early in the financial crisis, the high rate of foreclosures seemed to be due more to households' overreaching than to predatory lending. A disproportionate number of those being foreclosed on were well-educated, well-off and relatively young people.Housing - Prices

XML Compression via DAGs

Unranked trees can be represented using their minimal dag (directed acyclic graph). For XML this achieves high compression ratios due to their repetitive mark up. Unranked trees are often represented through first child/next sibling (fcns) encoded binary trees. We study the difference in size (= number of edges) of minimal dag versus minimal dag of the fcns encoded binary tree. One main finding is that the size of the dag of the binary tree can never be smaller than the square root of the size of the minimal dag, and that there are examples that match this bound. We introduce a new combined structure, the hybrid dag, which is guaranteed to be smaller than (or equal in size to) both dags. Interestingly, we find through experiments that last child/previous sibling encodings are much better for XML compression via dags, than fcns encodings. We determine the average sizes of unranked and binary dags over a given set of labels (under uniform distribution) in terms of their exact generating functions, and in terms of their asymptotical behavior.Comment: A short version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of ICDT 201