This paper explores the effects of mandatory third-party review of mortgage contracts on consumer choice. The study is based on a legislative pilot carried out in Illinois in 2006, under which mortgage counseling was triggered by applicant credit scores or by their choice of ldquo;risky...

During the housing boom, financially constrained home buyers artificially inflated transaction prices in order to draw larger mortgages. Using transaction data from Illinois that includes sellers' offers to inflate prices, I estimate that in 2005-2008, up to 16% of highly-leveraged transactions...

We examine the risk neutral probability density (RND) for the S&P 500 extracted from real-time bid and ask quotes for index options, under extreme market stress during the fall of 2008. The RND provides exceptional detail about investors' expectations as intraday volatility increased to a level...

This paper proposes a swarm intelligence approach based on a disjunctive graph model in order to schedule a manufacturing system with resource flexibility and separable setup times. Resource flexibility assigns each operation to one of the alternative resources (assigning sub-problem) and,...

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only...

Mortgage counseling is regarded as an integral tool in ensuring appropriate choices by prospective home buyers. We use micro-level data from an urban voluntary counseling program aimed at disadvantaged households to assess its effectiveness. We find substantially lower ex-post delinquency rates...

During the housing boom, many subprime home buyers were not able to make a mort- gage down payment and therefore were at risk of being rationed from the market. To resolve the issue, some buyers, sellers and intermediaries artificially expanded the scope of transactions by including items that...