Credit Supply, Homeownership and Mortgage Debt

We analyse the effect of credit supply on households' homeownership status and mortgage debt, as well as other variables relating to housing costs and home equity. We demonstrate that banking deregulation as enacted by the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) together with states' autonomy to set the degree and timing of deregulation provides an exogenous shift in credit supply which shows variation across states and time. We use this variation to isolate the effect of credit supply from confounding factors which could simultaneously affect credit supply and demand. Using a rich individual-level panel covering the period 1996 to 2008, and controlling for individual and region-year fixed effects, we find that a shift from full regulation to full deregulation increases the probability of owning a home by one, and of having a mortgage by two percentage points. The deregulation observed between 1990 and 2005 can explain at least one fifth, and up to 45% of the increase in homeowneship and the share of households with mortgages. For observations residing in non-metropolitan areas, we also find significant effects of deregulation on the amount of mortgage debt, reported home values, monthly mortgage payments, and debt to value as well as debt to income ratios. Most of these effects are driven by young households, and by individuals with higher incomes. Our results inform on the causes of the rise in homeownership and mortgage debt in the 1990s and 2000s which have led up to the housing crisis in the late 2000s

Homeownership and Unemployment Duration

We examine the effects of homeownership on individuals' unemployment durations in the USA. We take into account that an unemployment spell can terminate with a job or with a non-participation transition. The endogeneity of homeownership is addressed through the estimation of a full maximum likelihood function which jointly models the competing hazards and the probability of being a homeowner. Unobserved factors contributing to the probability of being a homeowner are allowed to be correlated with unobservable heterogeneity in the hazard rates. We find that unemployed homeowners are less likely to find a job than renters. The effect is small but statistically significant for most specifications. The effect is stronger for outright owners and weaker for mortgage holders. We also find that outright owners have a higher and mortgage holders a lower probability of exiting to non-participation than renters

Ethnic concentration and language fluency of immigrants in Germany

Studies that investigate the effect of the regional ethnic composition on immigrant outcomes have been complicated by the self-selection of ethnic minorities into specific neighbourhoods. We analyse the impact of own-ethnic concentration on the language proficiency of immigrants by exploiting the fact that the initial placement of guest-workers after WWII was determined by labour demanding firms and the federal labour administration and hence exogenous to immigrant workers. Combining several data sets, we find a small but robust and significant negative effect of ethnic concentration on immigrants’ language ability. Simulation results of a choice model in which location and learning decisions are taken simultaneously confirm the presence of the effect. Immigrants with high learning costs are inclined to move to ethnic enclaves, so that the share of German-speakers would increase only modestly even under the counterfactual scenario of a regionally equal distribution of immigrants across Germany

Market Power and Efficiency of Islamic Banking and Conventional Banking in Indonesia

ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) of banking industry requires both Islamic and conventional banking to improve their efficiency because the competition in banking market industry will be more intense. Therefore, this study aims to identify the type of hyphotesis of industrial organization which exists in Islamic and conventional banks in order to investigate their readiness for AEC. The research sampling consists of 10 Islamic banks and 10 conventional banks from January 2009 to December 2016. To measure x-efficiency and scale efficiency, this research uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Meanwhile, the concentration is measured by Lerner index. The hypothesis is tested by using panel regression. The result shows SCP (Structure-Conduct-Performance) hypothesis is closely applied to Islamic and conventional banks because market concentration significantly influences profitability. RMP (Relative Market Power) hypothesis is also closely applied to Islamic and conventional banking, this indicates Indonesian banking has market power in determining prices and this condition makes the profit higher. RES (Relative Efficiency Structure) and SES (Scale Efficiency Structure) hypothesis do not exist in both conventional and Islamic banks because x-efficiency and scale efficiency do not affect profitability, concentration, and market share simultaneously. Market power and efficiency researches are commonly conducted in conventional banking, however there are only a few research in Islamic banking area. The novelty of this study is the comparison between conventional and Islamic banking in the term of market structure and efficiency

Manufacturer's mixed pallet design problem

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We study a problem faced by a major beverage producer. The company produces and distributes several brands to various customers from its regional distributors. For some of these brands, most customers do not have enough demand to justify full pallet shipments. Therefore, the company decided to design a number of mixed or ‘‘rainbow’’ pallets so that its customers can order these unpopular brands without deviating too much from what they initially need. We formally state the company’s problem as determining the contents of a pre-determined number of mixed pallets so as to minimize the total inventory holding and backlogging costs of its customers over a finite horizon. We first show that the problem is NP-hard. We then formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear program, and incorporate valid inequalities to strengthen the formulation. Finally, we use company data to conduct a computational study to investigate the efficiency of the formulation and the impact of mixed pallets on customers’ total costs. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Do Ethnic Enclaves Impede Immigrants’ Integration? Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Social-Interaction Approach

It is widely debated whether immigrants who live among co-ethnics are less willing to integrate into the host society. Exploiting the quasi-experimental guest worker placement across German regions during the 1960/70s as well as information on immigrants' inter-ethnic contact networks and social activities, we are able to identify the causal effect of ethnic concentration on social integration. The exogenous placement of immigrants ‘switches off’ observable and unobservable differences in the willingness or ability to integrate which have confounded previous studies. Evidence suggests that the presence of co-ethnics increases migrants' interaction cost with natives and thus reduces the likelihood of integration

Assessing prospective chemistry teachers' understanding of gases through qualitative and quantitative analyses of their concept maps

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The use of concept mapping as a tool to measure the meaningful learning of students is the focus of this study. The study was carried out with 24 last year students (22 years old) from the Department of Chemistry Teaching at Fatih Faculty of Education, Karadeniz Technical University (KTU). Prospective Chemistry Teachers (PCT) were asked to create concept maps using a list of given concepts related to gases. An examination of the PCTs' maps revealed that the students could not form hierarchical maps even after being shown examples of the basic elements and meaningful propositions between the concepts. After being provided with feedback about their concept maps and trained to form non-hierarchical concept maps, the students were asked to create new maps. This time they were allowed to use either hierarchical or non-hierarchical maps. When their new maps were examined, we found that most of the PCTs formed non-hierarchical maps. However, they still could not form meaningful relationships between the given concepts. We also found that the PCTs had some misconceptions about gases and kinetic molecular theory that explains gas behavior. The study ended up with some suggestions and implications for educators and researchers related to pre-service teachers' training

Asymmetric Information and Non-Performing Financing: Study in the Indonesian Islamic Banking Industry

The purposes of this study are: First, to analyze the indications of moral hazard and adverse selection on Indonesian Islamic commercial banks. Second, to analyze the influence of moral hazard and adverse selection on the Non Performance Financing of Indonesian Islamic banks. Two methods were used for this purpose, a qualitative content analysis approach derived from the results of interviews with the banker from the Islamic commercial banks. Besides that this study also uses Error Correction Model (ECM), with data taken from these listed Islamic banking from 2010 to June 2016. The results show that the indications of moral hazard have a positive effect on the non-performing financing (NPF) in the short run. The indication of the presence of moral hazard occurs at the long run on GDP variable, and the allocation of Murabaha financing (RM) has a positive effect on the mudharabah (FM) profit and loss sharing. The test results also show that adverse selection that represented by the profit sharing rate (PSR) has a positive effect on the level of risk sharing toward non-performing financing (NPF) in the long run.DOI: 10.15408/aiq.v10i2.739

The Effectiveness of Predict-Observe-Explain Technique in Probing Students' Understanding about Acid-Base Chemistry: A Case for the Concepts of pH, pOH and Strength

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The present study describes high school students’ conceptions about acids and bases in terms of pH, pOH, microscopic level, strength, and concentration. A total of 27 high school students participated in the study. The data was collected using 3 POE tasks and a semi-structured interview. The data analysis demonstrated that most of the students had poor understanding related to a drawing of weak and strong acids. In addition, the findings revealed that the POE’s were effective in terms of gathering students’ predictions and reasons for the prediction of outcomes in an open-ended format. The POE tasks also revealed that some of the students had misconceptions regarding pH and pOH. The students believed that pH was a measurement of the acidity, while pOH was a measurement of the basicity. The findings obtained have certain implications for the secondary chemistry program