Business Commons^™

Changing Patterns Xi: Mortgage Lending To Traditionally Underserved Borrowers & Neighborhoods In Greater Boston, 1990-2003, Jim Campen

Gastón Institute Publications

The present study is the latest in a series of annual updates of the original report, Changing Patterns: Mortgage Lending in Boston, 1990-1993. Beginning in 1998, the reports’ geographic scope was expanded t o include an examination of mortgage lending patterns in 27 cities and towns surrounding the city of Boston. In last year’s report, the geographic coverage was further expanded to include a total of 108 communities.

The text that follows this introduction highlights some of the most significant findings that emerge from the extensive set of tables and charts that constitute the bulk of the report. The …

Changing Patterns Xi: Mortgage Lending To Traditionally Underserved Borrowers And Neighborhoods In Greater Boston, 1990-2003, Jim Campen

Gastón Institute Publications

The present study is the latest in a series of annual updates of the original report, Changing Patterns: Mortgage Lending in Boston, 1990-1993. Beginning in 1998, the reports’ geographic scope was expanded t o include an examination of mortgage lending patterns in 27 cities and towns surrounding the city of Boston. In last year’s report, the geographic coverage was further expanded to include a total of 108 communities.

The text that follows this introduction highlights some of the most significant findings that emerge from the extensive set of tables and charts that constitute the bulk of the report. The …

Weir River Estuary: Land Protection Plan, Chantal Lefebvre, Michelle Portman

Urban Harbors Institute Publications

If economic growth were the only measure of a community’s health and vitality, then the communities of Cohasset, Hingham, and Hull are fairing well. But this economic success is generally accompanied by changes in the physical landscape that can be unsettling for residents, especially when it means more development and expansion at the expense of culturally and socially important open space areas such as parks, woods, and marshes. The rapid pace and fragmented nature of such sprawling development gives communities little opportunity to come to terms with the long-term impacts, which in turn can lead to a sense of powerlessness …

U. S. Competitiveness In The Global Financial Services Industry, Lawrence G. Franko

Financial Services Forum Publications

The World Trade Center Towers: they were the headquarters of Morgan Stanley, one of the world’s leading investment banks, and of Cantor Fitzgerald, the world’s leading trader of U.S. government bonds. They were also the work location of 9,000 Merrill Lynch employees. The Citicorp Building. The Prudential Tower. The New York Stock Exchange. These actual and recently uncovered potential terrorist targets in the United States are financial services companies and organizations. Add to them the threats to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and one could conclude that seven out of ten terrorists prefer financial services.

This focus …

Technical Note: Comparative Static Analysis Of Information Value In A Canonical Decision Problem, Jeffrey Keisler

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

To gain insight into the behavior of the value of information, this paper identifies specific rules for a canonical decision problem: the two-act linear loss decision with normal prior probability distributions. Conditions are derived for which the expected value of perfect information increases when mean and standard deviation are both linear functions of an exogenous variable. A variety of richer decision problems can be adapted to the problem, so that the general results obtained here can be immediately applied to understand drivers of information value.

Economic Engagement: An Avenue To Employment For Individuals With Disabilities, William Kiernan, John Halliday, Heike Boeltzig

All Institute for Community Inclusion Publications

The role that employment has played for persons with disabilities over the past several decades has moved from one of no engagement in the workforce to a realization that persons with disabilities can work and are interested in working. The shrinking workforce has increased employers' interest in looking at the full range of potential workers, including those previously considered unemployable. The growing economy—coupled with the declining birth rate, the increase in technology and supports for a diverse workforce, and the increasing expectation that all persons should be provided with the opportunity to work—has led to a new view of individuals …

Institute Brief: Taking The Mystery Out Of Customer Service, Heike Boeltzig, Lora Brugnaro, Cecilia Gandolfo, Amy Gelb, Karen Zimbrich, Lara Enein-Donovan, Cindy Tsui, Joy Gould

The Institute Brief Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

With the current emphasis on universal access to employment services for all members of the community, the workforce development field needs to evaluate service delivery. A "mystery shopper" program is one of many evaluation tools available to ensure continuous quality improvement and customer satisfaction. This technique allows organizations to collect data on the experiences of One-Stop Career Center customers from the customer perspective. The brief includes a sample shopper questionnaire.

Designing A Pre-Apprenticeship Model For Women Entering And Succeeding In The Construction Trades, Susan Moir Scd, Elizabeth Skidmore

Labor Studies Faculty Publication Series

It has been over a quarter century since the Carter administration set a goal of increasing the number of women working in the construction industry to 6.9% of the workforce. It is often overlooked that the stated intent of this policy initiative was for women to make up 25% of construction workers by the year 2000 (Eisenberg, 1999). While some isolated projects have met or exceeded the 6.9% target, the number of women working in the construction trades nationally increased in the first few years after 1979, but leveled off at under 3% in the early 1980’s and has stayed …

South Shore Vessel Pumpout Evaluation & Outreach Plan, Final Report, Dan Hellin, Chantal Lefebvre, Michelle Portman, Samantha Woods

Urban Harbors Institute Publications

During the course of this study, 413 boaters, seven pumpout facility operators and a number of state and municipal officials either were interviewed or completed questionnaires focused on the boat sewage pumpout facilities along the South Shore of Massachusetts.

The aims of the boater survey were to:

• collect data on how boaters disposed of their sewage waste;
• learn how well informed boaters were regarding the location of sewage pumpouts;
• determine if boaters were able to find operational pumpout facilities when they needed them;
• learn what common problems had been experienced when using pumpouts;
• determine if there were adequate facilities to …

An Empirical Investigation Of Decision-Making Satisfaction In Web-Based Decision Support Systems, Pratyush Bharati, Abhijit Chaudhury

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

Web-based information systems are increasingly being used for decision support applications. However few empirical studies have been conducted on web-based decision support systems (DSS). This experimental research endeavors to understand factors that impact decision-making satisfaction in web based decision support systems. Using structural equation modeling approach, the analysis reveals that information quality and system quality influence decision-making satisfaction, while information presentation does not have an effect on decision-making satisfaction.

Allocating Contractor Risks In The Hanford Waste Cleanup, Jeffrey M. Keisler, William A. Buehring, Peter D. Mclaughlin, Mark A. Robershotte, Ronald G. Whitfield

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

Organizations may view outsourcing as a way to manage risk. We developed a decision-analytic approach to determine which risks the buyer can share or shift to vendors and which ones it should bear. We found that allocating risks incorrectly could increase costs dramatically. Between 1995 and 1998, we used this approach to develop the request for proposals (RFP) for the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) privatization initiative for the Hanford tank waste remediation system (TWRS). In the model, we used an assessment protocol to predict how vendors would react to proposed risk allocations in terms of their actions and their …

Plebiscites And The Public Purse: U.S. Experience With Direct Democracy, Arthur A. Goldsmith

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

The United States is a distinctive case for studying the way extensive direct democracy can affect fiscal policy. Every state in the Union allows voters to decide certain ballot questions about how to raise and spend public revenue. The U.S. record shows that large‐scale plebiscites fail to produce reliably “pro‐poor” government finance. Direct citizen involvement in fiscal policy has not led to uniformly equitable or financially sustainable state budgets. Nor has it mobilized low‐income groups to express and defend their economic interests. When called upon to make decisions about the amounts and purposes of statewide government spending, the electorate is …

Borrowing Trouble? Iv: Subprime Mortgage Refinance Lending In Greater Boston, 2000-2002, Jim Campen

Gastón Institute Publications

The present report is the fourth in the annual series begun by that initial study; it extends the time period covered through 2002, and expands the number of individual cities and towns for which data on subprime refinance lending are provided to 108.

Although motivated by a concern with predatory lending, this study and its predecessors – like all of the other quantitative studies of which I am aware – analyzes and reports on lending by subprime lenders. It is therefore important to emphasize that although all predatory loans are subprime, only a fraction of subprime loans are predatory. While …

Risk Sharing And The Market For Corporate Control: A Case For Golden Parachutes, Atreya Chakraborty

Accounting and Finance Faculty Publication Series

The predictability of security returns has received considerable attention in the literature, and yet the predictability of bond returns beyond the US markets has remained far less explored. Here we plan to remedy the shortcoming, and in that effort we analyse the ability of several predetermined information variables in predicting bond returns in the European market. We test if variables, commonly used for that matter in the context of other markets (such as inverse relative wealth, term spread, real bond yield and a January dummy) are also useful predictors of European bond returns. Due to some particularities of the sample …

Using Choice-Boards To Create Business Value, Pratyush Bharati, Abhijit Chaudhury

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Persistent Dependence In Foreign Exchange Rates? A Reexamination, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

We test for stochastic long-memory behavior in the returns series of currency rates for eighteen industrial countries using a semiparametric fractional estimation method. A sensitivity analysis is also carried out to analyze the temporal stability of the longmemory parameter. Contrary to the findings of some previous studies alluding to the presence of long memory in major currency rates, our evidence provides wide support to the martingale model (and therefore for foreign exchange market efficiency) for our broader sample of foreign currency rates. Any inference of long-range dependence is fragile, especially for the major currency rates. However, long-memory dynamics are found …