Endogenous Mortgage Choice, Borrowing Constraints and the Tenure Decision

Earlier research has shown that lender income and wealth constraint ratios discourage homeownership. This empirical research has been based on home purchasers using an 80 percent loan-to-value (LTV) fixed-rate conventional loan. Employing the same assumption, we find that the constraints lowered the ownership rate of our 1919 young home purchasers by about 20 percentage points. However, households are not restricted to putting 20 percent down and choosing a fixed- rate loan. When we allow households to select the optimal LTV and mortgage type (adjustable or fixed-rate with Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or conventional insurance), the percentage of our sample that is credit constrained declines from 71 to 49. Moreover, the measured impact on the homeownership rate of the constraints falls to only 4 percentage points. Further, FHA loans are estimated to increase homeownership by only 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points.

Note and Comment

Baseball and the Judiciary - The acceptance by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis of the position of supreme arbiter of professional baseball, as recently announced, raises questions of good taste if not of propriety. It has been generally assumed that Judges of the District Court of the United States have their hands amply full if they do the work incumbent upon them in a way befitting a judge of the United States. It may well be true that the salary provided by the Government is grossly inadequate, but we dare say that no one has considered that the remedy for such condition was to be found through outside jobs paying additional compensation

Clinical Characteristics and Treatment Patterns of Children and Adults With IgA Nephropathy or IgA Vasculitis: Findings From the CureGN Study

Introduction: The Cure Glomerulonephropathy Network (CureGN) is a 66-center longitudinal observational study of patients with biopsy-confirmed minimal change disease, focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, membranous nephropathy, or IgA nephropathy (IgAN), including IgA vasculitis (IgAV). This study describes the clinical characteristics and treatment patterns in the IgA cohort, including comparisons between IgAN versus IgAV and adult versus pediatric patients. Methods: Patients with a diagnostic kidney biopsy within 5 years of screening were eligible to join CureGN. This is a descriptive analysis of clinical and treatment data collected at the time of enrollment. Results: A total of 667 patients (506 IgAN, 161 IgAV) constitute the IgAN/IgAV cohort (382 adults, 285 children). At biopsy, those with IgAV were younger (13.0 years vs. 29.6 years, P < 0.001), more frequently white (89.7% vs. 78.9%, P = 0.003), had a higher estimated glomerular filtration rate (103.5 vs. 70.6 ml/min per 1.73 m2, P < 0.001), and lower serum albumin (3.4 vs. 3.8 g/dl, P < 0.001) than those with IgAN. Adult and pediatric individuals with IgAV were more likely than those with IgAN to have been treated with immunosuppressive therapy at or prior to enrollment (79.5% vs. 54.0%, P < 0.001). Conclusion: This report highlights clinical differences between IgAV and IgAN and between children and adults with these diagnoses. We identified differences in treatment with immunosuppressive therapies by disease type. This description of baseline characteristics will serve as a foundation for future CureGN studies

Note and Comment

Baseball and the Judiciary - The acceptance by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis of the position of supreme arbiter of professional baseball, as recently announced, raises questions of good taste if not of propriety. It has been generally assumed that Judges of the District Court of the United States have their hands amply full if they do the work incumbent upon them in a way befitting a judge of the United States. It may well be true that the salary provided by the Government is grossly inadequate, but we dare say that no one has considered that the remedy for such condition was to be found through outside jobs paying additional compensation