To protect against losses when borrowers prepay to take advantage of declining interest rates,banks and insurance companies have come to rely on "yield maintenance" clauses. Theseprovisions require the borrower to make a lump sum payment to cover the lender’s potential lossfrom...

School safety is a critical issue for school staff and administrators, policymakers, and parents across the nation. Media coverage of school shootings, gang violence, and bullying at school and online highlight the increasing need to understand how safe students feel at school, and how school...

Over the past 20 years, California has made substantial investments in intra-metropolitan passenger rail infrastructure, expanding existing systems and building new ones. According to advocates of New Urbanism, such investment should encourage the growth of mixed-use transit-oriented...

Understanding the housing choices of the older households will grow in importance as the baby boom generation starts to retire. This proposed analysis utilizes a rich longitudinal data set (PSID) to provide insight into the reasons that older households leave homeownership to become renters....

Brazil has largely accomplished its urban transition but housing conditions for many residents of its urban centers remain such that they have large negative effects on individual and social welfare. This report develops a comprehensive measure of housing adequacy based on seven different...

Amid concerns of how U.S. cities "sprawl", it is useful to look at the cities of other developed nations, in particular Western Europe which has attained U.S. - type prosperity, but which is reputed to have cities Americans should look to as a model. We examine recent data which suggest that...

In the last few decades, U.S. financial markets have witnessed a dramatic increase in the sophistication and size of the secondary market for mortgage loans. By 2002, close to 90 percent of conforming mortgage loan originations in the U.S. were sold into the secondary market. Although there is...

The existing literature in commercial mortgage defaults focuses on the process for loans in the current status to the default status. This study recognizes that commercial mortgage default is not a one-step process and examines a previously unexplored aspect in the whole default process, that is...

Social scientists studying the disadvantages of poor urban neighborhoods have focused on the quality of publicly provided amenities. However, the quantity and quality of local private amenities, such as grocery stores and restaurants, can also have important quality of life implications for...

The effects of two major demographic forces are traced between 1950 and 2040: the formation and aging of the baby boom generation and the reduction and subsequent return of large-scale immigration. These forces combine to mark several major turning points essential for understanding the changing...