Who defaults on their home mortgage?

Since February 2010, detailed information on every home mortgage default and foreclosure in New York State must be filed with the New York State Banking Department (NYSBD). Pairing the NYSBD's data with data on originations from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) enables us to identify the race and ethnicity of borrowers who defaulted on their home mortgages (in New York State). Like many previous studies, we find strong racial and ethnic disparities in lending practices, but we do not find conclusive evidence that HMDA-measurable forms of discrimination increased a borrower's probability of default. After controlling for other factors, we find that the interest rates charged to black and Latino borrowers tended to be higher than the ones charged to their white and non-Latino counterparts. This may be one reason why blacks and Latinos tend to default at a higher rate, but other factors, such as the tendency of black and Latino borrowers to take out larger loans than their white and non-Latino counterparts, may also have contributed to the higher default rate among black and Latino borrowers.mortgage; default; foreclosure; discrimination

Lu Xun, Mao Zedong, Perhaps a Badger

Urbanatomy has been running a series called “Why I Write” for the past several months, and we’ve noticed that when asked for their favorite Chinese author, many interviewees name Lu Xun (though Ian Johnson is a vocal dissenter). It’s likely that Lu Xun’s work will be known to even more non-Chinese speakers in the future, since Julia Lovell’s new translation of his complete fiction has hit bookshelves — read an excerpt from her introduction here, and see Jeff Wasserstrom’s review of the book here. So many decades after his death, why does Lu Xun remain one of China’s best-known authors, both at home and abroad? The answer, suggests Sean Macdonald, lies not only in Lu Xun’s talents as a writer, but also in the construction of “Lu Xun” as a cultural and political figure during the Mao era

Balance and Independence: The Judicial Process in the Charter Era

In January of 2007, the Chief Justice of Nova Scotia, the Honourable Justice Michael MacDonald, sat down with the author for a conversation about the role of the judiciary in era since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The conversation sparked discussion about the broad spectrum of important relationships in which the judiciary must engage. These include the relationships that the judiciary maintains with the bar, the litigants before it, the media, the public and, ultimately, the personal and professional relationships that exist between individual members of the judiciary. Maintaining these relationships requires judges to engage in a variety of balancing acts. One systemic concern for judges is the sometimes difficult effect that these balancing acts may have on judicial independence. The issue is particularly acute in the Charter era as individual rights are increasingly emphasized, sometimes in preference to other rights or interests. For example, where is the appropriate balance between the media’s freedom of expression and a judge’s judicial independence? The need to balance individual rights and judicial independence resonates throughout much of this conversation. Chief Justice MacDonald brings a broad perspective to this conversation. He has been able to witness these issues play out in a variety of different contexts, both before and after the advent of the Charter. After graduating from Dalhousie Law School in 1979, he worked as a litigator in Sydney, Nova Scotia for fifteen years before being appointed to the Trial Division of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court in April of 1995. In January of 2005, he was appointed Chief Justice of Nova Scotia, filling the void left by the retiring Honourable Justice Constance Glube

Has Stagnant Real Income Growth Contributed to An Uneven U.S. Housing Market Recovery Following the Great Recession?

The U.S. housing market recovery following the Great Recession has in many ways been atypical of earlier housing market recoveries. There is evidence that the recovery from 2011 through 2016 has disproportionately occurred among higher income earners, while improvement in the middle and moderate income sectors appears to have occurred later and to have been comparatively less robust. Stagnant growth in real median household income among moderate and middle income households and a weaker rate of new household formation during and immediately following the recession are seen as key variables contributing to an uneven housing market recovery

Intensification and Complexity in Teachers' Narrated Worklives

Reflecting on a previous study of teachers’ narratives, this epistolary conversation follows ideas of intensification and complexity that emerged in the authors’ return to the narrative accounts. Their conversation highlights representations of teaching as a struggle for recognition, personal happiness, and security—all within a system of accountability. Of central concern is the concept of complicity and how it is related to the seduction of consent through which teachers encounter a discourse of professionalism. By way of countering a misrecognized professionalism, the authors suggest that teachers’ narrative writings can be a means of forming a critical stance

Attention to Place: Learning to Listen

In this paper we set out to explore the speculative function and nature of narrative in autoethnographic research. We consider how place--as locus, milieu, setting in which we narrate the distance between ourselves and events we can remember, places where we can remember being (or, in this case, becoming: becoming authors)--enriches our understanding of autoethnographic research in Education. Determining autoethnography as new frontier and as site for the construction of a way of life, we offer and invite beginnings in literary enjoyment of life through autobiographical writings for the Social Science of Education. We find ourselves digressing, and suggest that this may be a turn our memory takes on its homeward journey. We celebrate life

Forecasting the New York State Economy with “Terraced” VARs and Coincident Indices

This paper introduces “Terraced” Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models, an innovative twist on traditional VAR modeling, which allows the econometrician to simultaneously forecast both exogenous and endogenous variables and the confidence intervals around those forecasts. In an application of our Terraced VAR framework, we have estimated coincident indices of economic activity for the United States, New York State and the six largest metropolitan areas of New York State and incorporated them into Terraced VARs, which forecast the unemployment rate, total non-farm employment, real wages and average hours worked in manufacturing in those regions

Intertemporal Poverty among Older Americans

This study uses aggregate intertemporal poverty indices proposed by Gradin, Del Rio, and Canto (2012) to measure poverty among older American households of different races from 2001 through 2009 employing data from the Health and Retirement Study. The findings indicate that the incidence of intertemporal poverty is higher among Black and Hispanic households and that it is also more intense and of longer duration. In our investigation of antipoverty effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, we find that the program has a significant impact in reducing intensity and inequality of poverty among poor populations. However, it does not significantly alter the incidence of intertemporal poverty

Determinants of Travel Intentions to a eighboring Destination

The primary purposes of this study were to collect information on neighboring travelers’ past visits and determinants of future intentions for an overnight pleasure trip. Data was collected on a wide variety of travel behaviors. The study is based on a telephone survey of 3,688 residents of ew Brunswick ( B) and ova Scotia ( S), two sister Provinces to Prince Edward Island, a major Canadian tourist destination. The results reveal 51.9% have visited PEI within the past five years, 36.7% have visited PEI more than five years ago, and 11.4% have never visited PEI. Linear logistic regression analysis revealed that all three groups had a positive reaction to at least one form of advertising used. In all cases, if the potential visitor recalled and/or responded to an advertisement for PEI, they were much more likely to revisit than those who did not

Hāhā (Cyanea grimesiana): Sowing the Seeds of Laughter

A symphony of soprano trills and song carried by northeasterly winds whorl through the misty, highland forests of Oahu. These mysterious phrases are alien to people and Hawaii alike. Forgotten melodies of the extinct ʻŌʻō historically echoed here, but now are replaced with those of the Japanese white-eye and others. These introduced birds are now the only fruit-eating species to inhabit the emerald-green canopies, which sprouted from seeds that were most likely expelled by birds in days passed. With more than half of Hawaii’s plants dependent on birds to eat and disperse their seeds, what does this novel ecosystem mean for future plant populations? My research investigates if non-native birds eat fruit from various critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild plants. Additionally, I recorded bird song and emitted them via speakers to test if I could entice birds to consume fruit from these rare plant species. One such plant was Hāhā, pictured above, which vividly demonstrates the beauty of Hawaiian flora and what is at stake if we neglect our stewardship of this archipelago. Less than 50 individuals of Hāhā can be found in the wild, yet its fruit was a particular delight for birds during the humid, summer months.Ope