The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement

Book Description

In 2000, homeownership in the United States stood at an all-time high of 67.4 percent, but the homeownership rate was more than 50 percent higher for non-Hispanic whites than for blacks or Hispanics. Homeownership is the most common method for wealth accumulation and is viewed as critical for access to the most desirable communities and most comprehensive public services. Homeownership and mortgage lending are linked, of course, as the vast majority of home purchases are made with the help of a mortgage loan. Barriers to obtaining a mortgage represent obstacles to attaining the American dream of owning one’s own home. These barriers take on added urgency when they are related to race or ethnicity.

In this book Stephen Ross and John Yinger discuss what has been learned about mortgage-lending discrimination in recent years. They re-analyze existing loan-approval and loan-performance data and devise new tests for detecting discrimination in contemporary mortgage markets. They provide an in-depth review of the 1996 Boston Fed Study and its critics, along with new evidence that the minority-white loan-approval disparities in the Boston data represent discrimination, not variation in underwriting standards that can be justified on business grounds. Their analysis also reveals several major weaknesses in the current fair-lending enforcement system, namely, that it entirely overlooks one of the two main types of discrimination (disparate impact), misses many cases of the other main type (disparate treatment), and insulates some discriminating lenders from investigation. Ross and Yinger devise new procedures to overcome these weaknesses and show how the procedures can also be applied to discrimination in loan-pricing and credit-scoring.

Customer Reviews:

Best yet but still not quite there.......2003-05-09

I work as a consultant for banking clients. Hope that does not influence this review too much.

The authors have prepared the best summary available of the economic and statistical evidence regarding potential racial discrimination in approving mortgages. This book is a replacement for approximately two file drawers of published and unpublished studies that I have collected for approximately five years.

It has its limitations though. Most of all, it is a specialized monograph for a specialist audience. Even though it is aimed at influencing the behavior of the banking industry, most managers and policymakers in that industry will find this volume tough going.

Second, the authors seem to have the opinion that the financial industry rather actively seeks to avoid lending to certain minority groups. This seems naive, in that there are lots of laws that make such policies risky and also because the industry has invested heavily in compliance managers and employee training to resolve such problems. The industry may not be perfect but it is not actively avoiding its responsibility for equitable lending policies. I don't think their perspective mars their analysis but I do think that the same outcome could have been produced with a less accusatory tone.

Third, the policy recommendations offered may not be as workable as the authors imply, since the data requirements for implementing their proposed statistical tests would actually be quite demanding and perhaps beyond the legal authority of the banking regulators.

Nonetheless, this is a very valuable book because it is the first to make an authoritative stab at consolidating the economic knowledge about a very difficult topic. If you're just trained as a generalist in this topic, the policy chapters will still be useful but you'll need to pass the book along to a colleague specializing in economic and statistical research to gain full value from both the critique and the recommendations for new statistical tests.

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The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Economic Issues
Reynold F. Nesiba
Manufacturer: Association for Evolutionary Economics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B0008DK8EW
Release Date: 2005-07-31

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Economic Issues, published by Association for Evolutionary Economics on September 1, 2003. The length of the article is 1199 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement.(Book Review)
Author: Reynold F. Nesiba
Publication: Journal of Economic Issues (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2003
Publisher: Association for Evolutionary Economics
Volume: 37 Issue: 3 Page: 813(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Stephen L. Ross and John Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology and Fair Lending Enforcement.: An article from: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

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Stephen L. Ross and John Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology and Fair Lending Enforcement.: An article from: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
Howard Jacob Karger
Manufacturer: Western Michigan University, School of Social Work
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement

ASIN: B000842T7A
Release Date: 2005-08-01

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, published by Western Michigan University, School of Social Work on September 1, 2004. The length of the article is 849 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Stephen L. Ross and John Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology and Fair Lending Enforcement.
Author: Howard Jacob Karger
Publication: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2004
Publisher: Western Michigan University, School of Social Work
Volume: 31 Issue: 3 Page: 171(4)

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The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement

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The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement
Stephen L. Ross
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQ6TJQ

Book Description

The fifth edition is packed with strategies, techniques, and tools to build or reinforce your management skills and meet the never-ending challenges that you face daily as a health care supervisor.

Book Description

Current Legal Problems, produced by the Faculty of Laws of University College London for forty years, is now being published by Oxford University Press. Part I, the Annual Review, is a new venture designed for practising and academic lawyers and students. It provides high-quality analysis of fundamental legal developments in each of the six core areas: Contract, Criminal Law, European Community Law, Property Law, Public Law, and Tort. Each Annual Review will cover a legal year: this volume covers the legal year which began on 1 October 1990 and ended on 31 July 1991. Developments during the 1991 summer vacation are also dealt with where possible, and will otherwise be covered in next year's Annual Review.

Book Description

Celestial Images celebrates the Golden Age of astronomical charts. Illustrations of cosmologies and heavenly phenomena entered an innovative phase at the time of the Renaissance, when the invention of printing improved the means of disseminating scientific knowledge and advances in astronomy revealed new information to be portrayed. This fortuitous conjunction engendered printed astronomical charts of surprising accuracy and delicate beauty.

Assembled here from the Mendillo Collection of Antiquarian Astronomical Charts and Maps are over eighty examples of some of the finest celestial cartography created. There are star charts (maps of the constellations and the full celestial sphere), charts of planetary systems (cosmologies), and a smaller third category, charts of celestial phenomena (such as nebulae, comets, and eclipses). Together, they pay homage to the time when simple systems explained the universe and humankind held friendly commerce with the skies.

Book Description

Chemical Intolerance identifies phenolic (aromatic) chemical compounds present in natural foodstuffs, pollens, certain food additives, tobacco smoke, perfumes, air pollution, etc., as nonimmunologic, but pharmacologic activators of allergic reactions in chemically intolerant individuals. Biochemical pathway sequences, with supporting scientific literature, are outlined to elucidate the mechanisms associated with formation of inflammatory mediators (prostaglandins, thromboxanes, and leukotrienes) upon activation by phenolic compounds and other chemical stimulants. The role of these inflammatory agents in respiratory, gastrointestinal, neurological, cardiovascular, and other disorders is discussed. Treatment modalities using precise dosages of selected phenolic compounds are outlined to provide clinicians with an effective means of therapy. The author also shares his own experience and personal findings based on 20 years of research, including his recommendations for therapy.

Book Description

Although researchers have long been aware that the species-typical architecture of the human mind is the product of our evolutionary history, it has only been in the last three decades that advances in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology have made the fact of our evolution illuminating. Converging findings from a variety of disciplines are leading to the emergence of a fundamentally new view of the human mind, and with it a new framework for the behavioral and social sciences. First, with the advent of the cognitive revolution, human nature can finally be defined precisely as the set of universal, species-typical information-processing programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability. Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors--problems such as mate selection, language acquisition, cooperation, and sexual infidelity. Consequently, the traditional view of the mind as a general-purpose computer, tabula rasa, or passive recipient of culture is being replaced by the view that the mind resembles an intricate network of functionally specialized computers, each of which imposes contentful structure on human mental organization and culture. The Adapted Mind explores this new approach--evolutionary psychology--and its implications for a new view of culture.

Customer Reviews:

An important introduction to evolutionary psychology.......2007-03-17

This is one of the earliest texts in the field called Evolutionary Psychology (EP). This specialization evolved from what Edward O. Wilson termed "Sociobiology" in the mid-1970s. EP applies the logic of sociobiology to human psychology. That is, how has natural selection shaped how humans think and make decisions? As editors Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome Barkow put it (page 7): "Evolutionary psychology is psychology informed by the fact that the inherited architecture of the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process." The book, in their conceptualization, has two goals (page 3): "The first is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology to a wider audience. . .The second goal of this volume is to clarify how this new field. . .supplies the necessary connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by anthropologists, economists, and historians."

They locate their perspective by juxtaposing evolutionary psychology with what the term "the standard social scientific model." The chapter by Tooby and Cosmides (Chapter 1) outlines this model in much more detail.
As we know, the SSSM insists that, for all practical purposes, human nature - and thus human behavior - is shaped by culture. Put less laconically, the SSSM rests on three cardinal tenets - two of them explicit, the third usually implicit. These are: (1) that humans have no innate behavioral tendencies; (2) that, consequently, human nature is solely the product of learning and socialization (in short, of "nurture"); from which it follows (3) that human nature (and consequently human behavior) is essentially quite malleable (my rendering of the perspective). Of course, evolutionary psychology moves in a different direction, emphasizing the effects of the evolutionary process on human behavior and thinking.

This edited volume includes a series of chapters exploring different aspects of human behavior. The section titles illustrate the variety of topics covered: Section II focuses on cooperation and social exchange, noting that these have evolutionary bases; III examines the psychology of mating and sex; IV looks at parental care and children; V considers perception and language as evolutionary adaptations; VI takes a look at environmental aesthetics (such as evolved responses to landscapes); VII has only one chapter--looking at the evolution of psychodynamic mechanisms. The volume closes with an essay by Jerome Barkow.

Not all readers will be convinced by the arguments raised in this volume. However, it serves an important purpose by unapologetically claiming that we cannot understand much of human psychology (and other social behaviors) without considering human evolution. Indeed, it is hard to complain about this overarching perspective. However, readers may well dispute specific applications of the perspective. In the end, this is a rich volume and will prod the reader to think differently about "human nature."

Evolution from Several Vantages.......2002-06-10

This book is a massive tome on evolutionary factors that influence human behavior. It begins with clarification of the kind of Darwinism the authors appeal to, so that everyone is on the same page, and considers the general psychological foundations of Darwinism on culture.

The book then moves on to discuss cognitive adaptations for social exchange, citing human and non-human examples. The book also includes the evolutionary psychology of mating and sex, examining preferences for mate selection and competition, mechanisms for sexual attraction, and the evolutionary use of women as chattel (something any Old Testament and Quran reader can relate to).

A significant portion of the book is devoted to parental care and children, examining how pregnancy sickness, patterns between twins, maternal-infant vocalizations, and child play in the form of chasing each other are all evolutionary mechanisms that continue to be featured.

Steven Pinker adds an essay on natural language and natural selection; Roger Shepard contributes an essay on the man's perceptual adaptation to the natural world; both of which demonstrate the interconnectedness between perception, language, and adaptation.

The book concludes with some of its most esoteric issues: environmental aesthetics, intrapsychic processes, and the theoretical implications of culural phenomena.

The whole book, while not necessarily over-academic, is ultimately dense reading. Most of the concepts and conceptualizations require mental work to apprehend, while the statistics and empirical evidence are clearly described. While drawing from many disparate areas of evolutionary biology, all the essays find their ultimate significance in how the mind, in particular, has adapted to environmental forces. A demanding, but facinating, read.

A fresh start.......2000-04-26

The argument - and it is an argument - is that human behaviour is strongly influenced by evolved psychological mechanisms, and that those mechanisms are numerous and specific, rather than just one general learning mechanism - ie a human baby comes with an installed operating system and quite a lot of free software, and is definitely not a blank slate. What makes the argument persuasive is the attempt to import the scientific method - hypotheses falsifiable by experiment - to an area previously characterised by mumbojumbo and pseudoscience. Not all the attempts are successful, but as they say it's a start. 100 years late (for psychology) it is saying (a) the brain is an organ so it must have evolved too - let's think about it in a Darwinian fashion and (b) let's try to make pyschology a science not a humanity. It is potentially very offensive to existing psychology practitioners, because it implies that most existing psychologists are witch doctors. It is also very offensive to large bodies of public policy wonks (let's not beat about the bush here - in American speak this book is very offensive to liberal Democrats), essentially saying that most of the "science" behind social and educational policy has no foundation. And because it is polemical - it is shooting at a century of vested interests after all - it overstates its case in some places, although the writers are usually very careful to stress that while behavioural programmes may be partly pre installed, behaviour itself is not hardwired.

It was the start for me of looking at the way we think in a completely different light and led me to later, more detailed, more balanced statements of the case.

It is pretty hard going in places, particularly as they do rather tiresomely go out of their way trying to avoid giving direct offence, but they're not fooling anyone (not mss67 for a start.)But in reality they are yelling that the Emperor ("learning/nurture is all") has no clothes. For all its faults it's the book that has most influenced my thinking in the last 10 years, and definitely a five star performance.

Great work.......2000-03-22

Finally, a branch of psychology which does not use the standard psycho-babble which distorted our views of human-kind in the 20th century.

More Tooby & Cosmides, please.......2000-02-07

I was prompted to respond by the review from the individual in Virginia. He or she didn't like the Tooby & Cosmides chapters whereas I feel they were by far the most interesting chapters in the book. Reading their long essay (Chapter 2)is one of the best favors psychologists can do for themselves. Being a psychology major, I know that I was often confused about psychology before reading it, but their combination of cognitive psychology with evolutionary biology finally gave me an idea of where psychology should be going in the future. If only social psychologists and domain-general cognitive psychologists would read it, their research and approach might not be so sterile and boring. My only regret is that the book contained some chapters that were not as strong as the early chapters, but the importance of the good chapters greatly outweighs any weaknesses in the other ones.

The Adapted Mind Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture

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The Adapted Mind Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture
Jerome H. , Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, editor Barkow
Manufacturer: Oxford U. Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000RKWH86

Book Description

The Fishfly is the inner monologue of Donald Michael Spinelli, a portrait artist turned hit man. Fishflies are a rich existential metaphor for Spinelli, who, like the tiny little bugs, is on a short mission to do or die. We find ourselves inside the mind of an artist with a secret inner life. The actual story takes place over a period of about 18 hours in New Orleans, with frequent flashbacks and digressions to New York City and the suburbs of Detroit. It culminates in a dramatic collision of the past, present and future. Though he has developed into a formidable artistic talent, Spinelli discovers he has spent half his life incapable of taking real action. Using the Internet, he has located the man who sexually assaulted him as a boy. Now, he is on a murderous trek into the dark inner sanctum of New Orleans society to avenge himself upon his assailant. The reader follows, moment by moment, as he deals with the twists and turns of being in action, for the first time in his life. Consumed by his guilt and obsession for revenge, he finally comes face to face, not just with the man who molested him but with his own inner demons as well. Through each turn of events, he is forced to confront the veracity of his stories and the impact and meaning they have had on his life.

Customer Reviews:

A Courageous Man Reveals His Truths .......2006-12-04

This book is the courageous first-person account of the boy, the teenager,the young man,the middle-aged man--one and the same person, juxtaposed with each other in masterful fashion.
The common threads throughout the book are the loneliness and self-loathing of a person who, all his life has had to deal with horrific verbal abuse, rejection and hatred of a castrating, bitter father.
Our protagonist is naturally desperate and craving any form of affection, positive recognition, even a pretense of love, which he thinks he has found in a trusted family friend, but the trade-off is a lifetime of another kind of pervasive pain.
He does not beat around the bush as I must do so as not to spoil the book for the reader. I will only say that his seeking revenge does not appear at all pathological in such ann instance.
Above all, this book is testimony to the fact that feelings know no time. The pain we endured 50 years ago can feel as fresh as if it happened yesterday.

The Fishfly.......2005-06-15

This one is a page-turner--so much so, that my husband spent an extra half hour on his exercise bike so he could finish and ended up very weak and sopping wet! Robert Maniscalco is an artist in every way and has a unique, yet comprehensible style of writing. If you enjoy reading quality fiction, this one should definitely be on your list!

Another Masterpiece.......2005-02-08

Robert Maniscalco is already well known as a portrait artist, a fine art gallery owner, an actor, a Detroit-area television host, a spokesman for the arts and a musician.
What more can this man do?
Apparently, he can write as well. And his writing is every bit as masterful as his paintings.
Maniscalco's first novel, The Fishfly, is another masterpiece by a renaissance man who seems to be great at whatever he endeavors to accomplish.
At first glance, one might mistake The Fishfly for a tired mystery novel, but it's not as predicable as you might think. And once you've spun wildly through the chapters, catching glimpses of the past, snipets of the present and maybe a look into the future out of the corner of your eye, you arrive at the end - breathless.
Anyone who has seen any of Maniscalco's paintings knows that he captures the soul of his subjects with subtle strokes that appear simple yet look past the mere surface to the core of the person. In The Fishfly, he has captured his characters with the same simplicity. Words aren't wasted, yet the characters come to life with an eeire intensity. If you don't know these characters when you first settle in with the novel, you can see, smell, taste, touch and hear them by the end.
The book races, sometimes at Warp Speed, through the universe of Don Spinelli - a portrait artist who is struggling to free himself from the demons of his past and ready to take action. He takes you along for the ride, sometimes pulling you around corners or through rooms you just might not want to be in. But that's part of the beauty of the book. You see and hear everything Spinelli is seeing and hearing and thinking. Quirkly, random, wild thoughts splat in your face from these pages...the same kinds of thoughts that race through all our minds, making us question our sanity. Captured on the pages of The Fishfly, they not only create a more vivid picture, but also assure us that, maybe we're not as crazy as we might have thought.
The semi-autobiographical book of the artist as a middle aged man is an adventure you'll not soon forget.

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Birdswim Fishfly
Gayathri Prabhu
Manufacturer: Rupa
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 8129109859
Release Date: 2006-02-02

Product Description

Novel set in contemporary India. by author of prize-winning book, Maya

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