The Legal Environment and the Choice of Default Resolution Alternatives: An Empirical Analysis

In addition to standard foreclosure, three other methods of resolution for mortgage defaults are available: bankruptcy protection, surrender of deed to the lender, and pre-foreclosure sale. This paper develops a model that specifies the choice of resolution method as a function of the state-specific legal environment and local area economic conditions. A large national data set is used to estimate a multinomial logit choice model for the 1987 to 1991 period. The results indicate that the choice of default resolution alternative is sensitive to the legal environment. The results imply that selected legal reforms will tend to improve the efficiency of the default resolution process.

The Demand Side: Uses of Research in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

This special issue on child and adolescent mental health contains a thoughtful set of papers that address many of the challenges in bridging research and practice. These articles, however, focus predominantly on the supply side of producing research for use by a range of audiences, including practitioners, administrators and policy makers. This commentary emphasizes the importance of attending to, and better understanding, the demand side with regard to how research evidence is evaluated, understood, and utilized. Drawing from work underway at the William T. Grant Foundation, the authors argue for the need to understand three broad topics: user settings and perspectives, political, economic and social contexts, and the various uses of research. Furthermore, understanding the use of research evidence, or the demand side, is itself a topic for empirical investigation. The authors conclude that, when it comes to supplying evidence, don’t forget the demand side

Projections onto translation—Invariant subspaces of L1(G)

AbstractLet G be a locally compact abelian group. A translation-invariant subspace in L1(G) may or may not be complemented depending on the structure of its hull in Ĝ. Techniques for deciding this complementation problem in a variety of situations are developed and illustrated with examples. A complete characterization is obtained for those ideals with a discrete hull

On the convergence to statistical equilibrium for harmonic crystals

We consider the dynamics of a harmonic crystal in $d$ dimensions with $n$ components, $d,n$ arbitrary, $d,n\ge 1$, and study the distribution $\mu_t$ of the solution at time $t\in\R$. The initial measure $\mu_0$ has a translation-invariant correlation matrix, zero mean, and finite mean energy density. It also satisfies a Rosenblatt- resp. Ibragimov-Linnik type mixing condition. The main result is the convergence of $\mu_t$ to a Gaussian measure as $t\to\infty$. The proof is based on the long time asymptotics of the Green's function and on Bernstein's ``room-corridors'' method

Multidimensional Binning Techniques for a Two Parameter Trilinear Gauge Coupling Estimation at LEP II

This paper describes two generalization schemes of the Optimal Variables technique in estimating simultaneously two Trilinear Gauge Couplings. The first is an iterative procedure to perform a 2-dimensional fit using the linear terms of the expansion of the probability density function with respect to the corresponding couplings, whilst the second is a clustering method of probability distribution representation in five dimensions. The pair production of W's at 183 GeV center of mass energy, where one W decays leptonically and the other hadronically, was used to demonstrate the optimal properties of the proposed estimation techniques.Comment: (25 pages, 11 figures

Exposing Sex Stereotypes in Recent Same-Sex Marriage Jurisprudence

In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court held in Baehr v. Lewin that same-sex couples denied the right to marry could state a claim for sex discrimination. With that decision, an argument that had previously been primarily a matter of academic debate was thrust into the center of one of the defining cultural wars of our time. Following Baehr, same-sex couples filed lawsuits in at least eleven states. In the past few years, the highest state courts in Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, as well as intermediate courts in Arizona and Indiana, have ruled on the issue; as of May 2007, appeals are pending in the highest courts in California, Connecticut, and Maryland. Some suits have been won by plaintiffs, leading either to marriage (Massachusetts) or civil unions providing all of the benefits of marriage (New Jersey and Vermont). Others, largely in closely divided opinions, have been lost by plaintiffs (New York and Washington). But while sex discrimination has been argued by the plaintiffs in each of these cases, no state high court since Baehr has found that denying a same-sex couple the right to marry successfully states a sex discrimination claim. Rather, the subsequent decisions have either ignored or rejected sex discrimination arguments. Indeed-and most troubling-several of the more recent opinions rejecting same-sex couples\u27 claims to the right to marry have actually relied in part on sex stereotypes, even as they reject arguments that such stereotypes are embodied in and perpetuated by exclusionary marriage laws. This Article considers the sex discrimination arguments in the context of the flurry of recent decisions issued by state courts and the arguments presented by parties and amici before those courts

Generation of measures on the torus with good sequences of integers

Let $S= (s_1<s_2<\dots)$ be a strictly increasing sequence of positive integers and denote $\mathbf{e}(\beta)=\mathrm{e}^{2\pi i \beta}$. We say $S$ is good if for every real $\alpha$ the limit $\lim_N \frac1N\sum_{n\le N} \mathbf{e}(s_n\alpha)$ exists. By the Riesz representation theorem, a sequence $S$ is good iff for every real $\alpha$ the sequence $(s_n\alpha)$ possesses an asymptotic distribution modulo 1. Another characterization of a good sequence follows from the spectral theorem: the sequence $S$ is good iff in any probability measure preserving system $(X,\mathbf{m},T)$ the limit $\lim_N \frac1N\sum_{n\le N}f\left(T^{s_n}x\right)$ exists in $L^2$-norm for $f\in L^2(X)$. Of these three characterization of a good set, the one about limit measures is the most suitable for us, and we are interested in finding out what the limit measure $\mu_{S,\alpha}= \lim_N\frac1N\sum_{n\le N} \delta_{s_n\alpha}$ on the torus can be. In this first paper on the subject, we investigate the case of a single irrational $\alpha$. We show that if $S$ is a good set then for every irrational $\alpha$ the limit measure $\mu_{S,\alpha}$ must be a continuous Borel probability measure. Using random methods, we show that the limit measure $\mu_{S,\alpha}$ can be any measure which is absolutely continuous with respect to the Haar-Lebesgue probability measure on the torus. On the other hand, if $\nu$ is the uniform probability measure supported on the Cantor set, there are some irrational $\alpha$ so that for no good sequence $S$ can we have the limit measure $\mu_{S,\alpha}$ equal $\nu$. We leave open the question whether for any continuous Borel probability measure $\nu$ on the torus there is an irrational $\alpha$ and a good sequence $S$ so that $\mu_{S,\alpha}=\nu$.Comment: 44 page