Using data from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), this paper estimates homeownership rates that would prevail in the United States if borrowing constraints were eliminated. These estimates are obtained by first identifying a group of unconstrained households in the SCF based on a unique set of survey questions. Housing tenure preferences are then estimated over unconstrained household...

The financial situation of undergraduate students remains a high-profile issue within the UK higher education sector, not least due to its perceived relationship with retention, well-being and success. This paper probes this question from a new direction, using concepts and approaches from the field of applied psychology to examine how students use various forms of credit and whether personalit...

This essay discusses whether “stealing” theories from other disciplines should always be avoided or whether there is any appropriate way of using theories developed in other disciplines in an information systems (IS) context. We take a look at the benefits and problems that have arisen in the IS field as a result of theory borrowing and suggest that – when done appropriately – such borrowing ma...

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary i...

W herever one turns these days, one seems to run into comments about the financial condition of the American household. Most of these comments refer to sources of increasing stress on the American consumer, from the historically low household savings rate to the historically high rates of bankruptcy and debt delinquency. On top of all this, demographic trends are raising the prospect of having ...

Libraries are service organizations that store data and function as main information resource centers for various users (Hernon and Altman, 1998; Hernon and Calvert, 2005; Huang, 2007; Raza and Nath, 2007). Traditionally, users go to the library for services, such as borrowing/returning books, accessing the reference directory, availing of interlibrary loans and document delivery, and browsing ...

Wireless services are one of the strongest growth areas in telecommunications today. Dynamic channel allocation schemes have garnered a considerable amount of attention as methods for achieving efficient use of system resources. Various combinations of permanent channel assignment, channel borrowing, shared pools of channels, channel ordering, channel reassignment, and dynamic adjustment of par...

A common perspective in macro-finance analyses links firms’ borrowing constraints to the liquidation value of physical assets firms pledge as collateral. We empirically investigate borrowing by non-financial firms in the US. We find that 20% of corporate debt by value is collateralized by specific physical assets (“asset-based lending” in creditor parlance), while 80% is based predominantly on ...