Digital Commons Network^™

Homeownership And Mortgage Loans: How Important Is A Conventional Loan?, Zachary Owen, Cory Curl

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Communities across the United States face a housing crisis that stems in part from a scarcity of conventional home mortgage loans. In 2020, the Urban Institute reported that when applying for a mortgage, Black applicants were denied 27.1% of the time, yet White applicants were denied only 13.6% of the time. These denial rates are highly correlated with homeownership rates. Today, despite policy efforts, the difference in White and Black homeownership rates is higher than in the 1960s when the government enforced discriminatory housing policy.

Because lenders often cite credit score concerns and high debt-to-income ratios as rationales to deny …

Addressing Money Laundering In The United States Real Estate Sector, Hunter Mccormick

Posters-at-the-Capitol

The United States faces threats to economic stability and legal integrity from money laundering practices in the real estate market. Legislative loopholes, complicit enablers, and aging technological systems used by government agencies allow individuals to flow ill-gotten wealth into the United States with little effort. As a result of these factors, local economies suffer job loss, once-inhabited properties lie empty in decay, and public trust in government weakens. Illegal wealth is transformed into protected assets in the form of property and can be stored to later fund terrorist organizations or influence the American people. Approximately $2.3 billion was laundered through …

The Factors That Influence Clinicians To Choose Rural Settings To Deliver Health Services, Julia Mattingly

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Years before the COVID-19 pandemic brought on a health care shortage in the United States, its rural areas were already struggling to obtain and attract primary care medical practitioners. The federal government has designed many programs with the intent of exposing clinicians to life in rural areas, but few have been successful at keeping medical practitioners in the long-term. Clinicians who are recruited to rural areas via loan repayment programs or other short-lived incentives often leave after only a few years.

In order to learn more about this long-running health policy problem, we set out to study the factors that …

How Community Satisfaction Can Determine The Success Of Tourism Development In A Community, Carter Unrau

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Many counties in Eastern Kentucky and central Appalachia in general have suffered intense economic hardship in the past decades due to the decline in coal and other mining industries which once supplied many jobs to the people of the region. A common remedy to this is increasing tourism development in these communities. While this tactic has seen positive effects in the region, there's been communities that have given a negative review of the increase in tourism development. With such an economic gain to be had, its imperative that the source of this issue should be rooted out and resolved to …

The Future Of Human Trafficking Legislation: A Policy Analysis, Zoe E. Hunt

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Current legislation and policies are not effective enough to fight human trafficking as it continues to change and evolve worldwide. Human trafficking is not just sex trafficking; labor trafficking, organ trafficking, people smuggling, and forced criminal activities. This evolving and changing global issue continues to grow into a highly profitable "business." Overseas, many countries struggle to handle this issue, and some countries do not handle it at all. The United States has a major human trafficking problem that will continue to worsen unless there is a change in the government. The U.S. Congress should be more focused on the growing …

Consumption Profiles Of Illicit And Neuropsychiatric Drugs In Urban And Rural Communities In Kentucky Using Sewage Epidemiology, Tara Croft, Katelyn Foppe, Rhiannon Huffines, Bikram Subedi

Posters-at-the-Capitol

The drug overdose deaths in the USA increased by ~20% from 2015 to 2016 to the total >63,600 drug overdose deaths in 2016. Kentucky is among the highest rate of drug overdose death states in the USA. The current estimates of the prevalence of substance abuse are based on the self-reported surveys, overdose/toxicological reports, and drug-related crime statistics. Survey-based conventional approaches are not only cost and time-intensive but also underestimate the actual consumption of drugs. As “wastewater never lie,” the drug residues in raw wastewater collected from the centralized wastewater treatment plants were utilized to determine the consumption rate of …

The Identification And Prevention Of Insider Threats, Matthew D. Waters

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Insider threats, or attacks against a company from within, are a pressing issue both domestically and internationally. Frequencies of these threats increase each year adding to the overall importance of further research analysis. In fact, many case studies have been conducted which state that these employees who participate in insider attacks tend to exhibit certain personality and characteristic traits, as well as certain observable behaviors, that would indicate to other employees that an attack is imminent. It is hypothesized that companies will be able to take a more preventative stance of security as opposed to a reactive stance by identifying …