Implications of risk-based pricing for affordable homeownership and community reinvestment goals

This dissertation examines the community reinvestment lending activities of prime lenders during the period of subprime industry growth. For the purposes of this dissertation, community reinvestment lending is defined to encompass the lending programs and products used by regulated lenders to meet their obligations under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). While a substantial and growing literature scrutinizes the subprime market, far less attention has been given to the development of community reinvestment lending by prime institutions. Each of the essays in this dissertation explores a different aspect of the interaction of community reinvestment lending with the subprime market. The first essay examines borrowers' substitution of community reinvestment mortgages for FHA and subprime products during the period 1998-2006. The second essay examines the role of equity extraction in community reinvestment borrowers' refinancing behavior, showing that the desire to extract equity combines with income constraints to create an economic rationale for subprime refinancing among a small set of borrowers. Lastly, the third essay documents the role of mortgage brokers in the refinancing decisions of community reinvestment mortgage borrowers, concluding that origination through a mortgage broker increases the likelihood of a transition into a higher-cost refinancing product

Advances in myelin imaging with potential clinical application to pediatric imaging

White matter development and myelination are critical processes in neurodevelopment. Myelinated white matter facilitates the rapid and coordinated brain messaging required for higher-order cognitive and behavioral processing. Whereas several neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis are associated with gross white matter damage and demyelination, other disorders such as epilepsy may involve altered myelination in the efferent or afferent white matter pathways adjoining epileptic foci. Current MRI techniques including T1 weighting, T2 weighting, FLAIR, diffusion tensor imaging, and MR spectroscopy permit visualization of gross white matter abnormalities and evaluation of underlying white matter fiber architecture and integrity, but they provide only qualitative information regarding myelin content. Quantification of these myelin changes could provide new insight into disease severity and prognosis, reveal information regarding spatial location of foci or lesions and the associated affected neural systems, and create a metric to evaluate treatment efficacy. Multicomponent analysis of T1 and T2 relaxation data, or multicomponent relaxometry (MCR), is a quantitative imaging technique that is sensitive and specific to myelin content alteration. In the past, MCR has been associated with lengthy imaging times, but a new, faster MCR technique (mcDESPOT) has made quantitative analysis of myelin content more accessible for clinical research applications. The authors briefly summarize traditional white matter imaging techniques, describe MCR and mcDESPOT, and discuss current and future clinical applications of MCR, with a particular focus on pediatric epilepsy