The secondary market for community development loans

Proceedings of the Conference on the Secondary Market for Community Development LoansCommunity development ; Loans ; Secondary markets

The struggle to establish a vibrant secondary market for community development loans

Securitization of loans and their sale to long-term investors has revolutionized many areas of finance: real estate, autos, consumer credit. But despite many efforts, it has not taken hold in community development financing. The obstacles to creating a secondary market for community development loans are similar to obstacles other markets faced: lack of data, standardization of documents and loan process, and loan volume. Other markets have managed to overcome these obstacles. Yet despite recent advances, such as the Community Reinvestment Fund’s issuance of rated securities in November 2004 and May 2006, the goal of a vibrant secondary market for community development loans seems as tantalizingly close today as it did nearly a decade ago, when a community development consultant wrote in Community Investments that “piece by piece, a secondary market is taking shape.” This development was in the “not-too-distant future. And, with the trend toward reduced public support, the sooner the better.”Asset-backed financing ; Community development ; Loans

Characteristics or Incentives: Why Do Employment Outcomes for the SSA Beneficiary Clients of VR Agencies Differ, on Average, from Those of Other Clients?

This report uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Vocational Rehabilitation Services Programs to compare employment outcomes of state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agency clients who receive Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) -- “beneficiary clients” -- to those of non-beneficiary clients, before and after controlling for detailed information on disability and other characteristics that are likely to affect outcomes. Differences are substantial. Characteristics do explain a substantial share of the differences, but substantial differences remain. For instance, we estimate that only 23 percent of beneficiaries who received services achieved earnings above $500 per month for at least 9 months out of a 15-month period, compared to 54 percent of non-beneficiaries – a 30 percentage point difference. After controlling for other characteristics, the difference is 17 percentage points. One likely explanation for a substantial portion of the remaining difference is work disincentives faced by beneficiary clients. During this period, SSI recipients lost 50 cents in benefits for every dollar earned above certain disregards, and SSDI beneficiaries lost all benefits if they earned more than$500 per month, again net of certain disregards, for more than nine months

Flipping Cubical Meshes

We define and examine flip operations for quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes, similar to the flipping transformations previously used in triangular and tetrahedral mesh generation.Comment: 20 pages, 24 figures. Expanded journal version of paper from 10th International Meshing Roundtable. This version removes some unwanted paragraph breaks from the previous version; the text is unchange

Electroactive micro and nanowells for optofluidic storage

This paper reports an optofluidic architecture which enables reversible trapping, detection and long term storage of spectrally multiplexed semiconductor quantum dot cocktails in electrokinetically active wells ranging in size from 200nm to 5μm. Here we describe the microfluidic delivery of these cocktails, fabrication method and principal of operation for the wells, and characterize the readout capabilities, storage and erasure speeds, internal spatial signal uniformity and potential storage density of the devices. We report storage and erase speeds of less than 153ms and 30ms respectively and the ability to provide 6-bit storage in a single 200nm well through spectral and intensity multiplexing. Furthermore, we present a novel method for enabling passive long term storage of the quantum dots in the wells by transporting them through an agarose gel matrix. We envision that this technique could find eventual application in fluidic memory or display devices

Nanofluidic tuning of photonic crystal circuits

By integrating soft-lithography-based nanofluidics with silicon nanophotonics, we demonstrate dynamic, liquid-based addressing and high Delta n/n(~0.1) refractive index modulation of individual features within photonic structures at subwavelength length scales. We show ultracompact tunable spectral filtering through nanofluidic targeting of a single row of holes within a planar photonic crystal. We accomplished this with an optofluidic integration architecture comprising a nanophotonic layer, a nanofluidic delivery structure, and a microfluidic control engine. Variants of this technique could enable dynamic reconfiguration of photonic circuits, selective introduction of optical nonlinearities, or delivery of single molecules into resonant cavities for biodetection