Thesis advisor: Patrick H. Byrne / In this dissertation, I attempt to contribute to Lonergan scholarship by bringing greater clarity to his notions of general and group bias. By applying these notions to a concrete event, the subprime mortgage crisis, I intend to shed light on their meaning and significance in a new way. Over the course of this dissertation, I will investigate and employ other theoretical tools that Lonergan provides, such as his notions of transcendental method, self-appropriation, common sense, and values, and especially the destructive impact of group and general bias upon the good of order. The theoretical ideas that are examined in this dissertation have a heuristic value, for they have the potential to help individuals notice areas and respond to issues that might have otherwise been overlooked. The subprime mortgage crisis, which arguably began when American house prices dropped in July of 2006, was the product of an accumulation of biased decisions over time. Lonergan's notion of the general bias of common sense afflicted many of the central parties involved in the subprime mortgage market leading up to the crisis, prompting them to conclude that house prices would interminably rise. Institutional relationships that were impaired by this biased orientation toward the housing market came to be further plagued by Lonergan's notion of group bias. Ultimately, I argue that subprime mortgage crisis was a manifestation of a breakdown in the good of order, which is a component of Lonergan's notion of the invariant structure of the human good. Chapter One consists of a presentation and explication of the set of Lonergan's theoretical tools that are utilized in this study. The chapter begins with an exploration of his transcendental method and then proceeds with a discussion that includes his notions of cognitional structure, self-appropriation, common sense, values and judgments of value, conversion, self-transcendence, authenticity, bias, and the invariant structure of the human good. Chapter Two serves a bridge between these theoretical terms and my analysis of the parties that were involved in the subprime mortgage crisis. In addition to arguing that the general bias of common sense distorted the decision making processes of many of the significant players in the subprime mortgage market, I will also contend that group bias was operative leading up to and during this crisis. The emphasis in this latter section will be on instances of "co-opted" group bias, or arrangements in which different parties cooperated with one another in mutually advantageous ways in the short-term, but to the detriment of the good of order. Chapters Three through Six each focus on one of the parties that played an instrumental role in the development and outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis: subprime lenders (Chapter Three), arrangers (Chapter Four), credit rating agencies (Chapter Five), and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Chapter Six). I examine key regulatory relationships in these chapters as well and note that, in many cases, they were ensnared by general and group bias. My concluding analysis is that, as an accumulation of biased decisions, the subprime mortgage crisis was an avoidable outcome, for individual submission to bias is not inevitable. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Following the fall of the Lehman Brothers in 2008, the U.S. saw the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1920's. This dissertation presents a summary of two previous major U.S. recessions, the Great Depression and the Savings and Loans Crisis, and an analysis of the root causes and consequences of the 2007-2009 recession is also provided, namely the bursting of the housing bubble, loose monetary policy, lax financial regulation, and misperception of risk. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, a bailout program implemented following the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in October 2008, is then discussed. Using county-level panel data, the effect of the implementation of TARP on unemployment patterns is then studied. The results show that TARP negatively affected unemployment patterns, so that TARP alleviated the sharp rise in unemployment after its inception

Credit derivatives are one of the most often discussed instruments which influenced the mortgage crisis in USA and consequently also the global financial crisis. Credit derivatives are complex instruments. The aim of this thesis is to describe credit derivatives, dealing with them, analyse the situation on the housing market in USA, determine what the role of credit derivatives in the crisis was and analyse other factors, which contributed to the creation of the crisis.

The thesis is aimed to describe and approach the REIT practice that is, especially in the U. S. very enhanced. In the first part, general parameters of real estate investment trusts are introduced and understated in connection with the depiction of the advantages and disadvantages of this issue. In chronological sequence, the development and progress of the U. S. real estate market is approached. The thesis further undertakes the current subject of the global financial crisis with a special focus on the REIT involvement and the potential application of the new EU directive - AIFMD (Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive). This directive is expected to harmonize the joint investments. The objective of the thesis is a detailed description and specification of REIT in selected developed countries (U. S., Western Europe, and Australia) followed by a comparation of these regimes and an analysis of the considerable real estate investment companies in the Czech Republic including the financial analysis of the public joint-stock companies. A development of Czech real estate market during the mortgage crisis is also depicted and a market forecast is prognosed. The thesis concludes potential restraints of the REIT legal introduction in the Czech Republic as this corporative type has not been lawfully validated there.

Real Estate law is the body of rules and regulations with legal codes that concern ownership, development and transactions. Real Estate has grown to be one of the main contributors to the nation's financial system. For decades, the housing market has been such an integral part of the economy. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the twenty-first century lax regulatory oversight led the nation to an economic collapse. Indeed, federal, state and local governments have become heavily involved in solving the downward spiral in the economy. This research focuses on the mortgage crisis in order to show how Real Estate law can in fact, restore the economy when the government has a balance between regulations and market discipline. The intent of this thesis was to study the occurrence of the mortgage crisis, the regulatory authorities and the legal effects of the housing market. Through the analysis of case law and statutes, data, previous recessions, and economic indicators, this thesis examines the key factors in our legal system that should drive reform in our economy. Results suggested that greater efforts to a regulatory structure generate a secure financial system. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is not only to solve our current mortgage crisis but also to mitigate or prevent future crises.

In this thesis, we aim to find the effect of economic crisis announcements arising from the US subprime mortgage crisis and European sovereign debt crisis on the market volatility in theBRIC countries. We implement a GARCH model in order to compare the effect of individual news announcements and find that the US crisis had a bigger impact on BRIC market volatility than the European crisis. Of particular note, we find the US bailout had a higher impact than the failure of Lehman Brothers or any European crisis dates that were considered. We then examine the volatility transmission mechanism by implementing a VAR model to create a spillover index. Following, we apply a rolling window approach, creating spillover plots which show that both return and volatility spillovers are affected by crisis announcements. The importance of our results are related to investor decision making, particularly the relationship between market return and risk in developing country markets. Far to our knowledge, no recent literature has compared the two crises in the way we have nor with the datasets we have used.

This thesis deals with the current financial crisis and its solutions. In the first part of this work are analyzed the main causes underlying the emergence of contemporary global crisies. Described are also the methods and financial products through which the crisies spread from the United States of America to the rest of the world, mentioned are main negative impacts of the crisis in the Czech Republic and anti-crisis measures taken by the czech government in context of crisis. In the second part of the work proposed recommendations that could reduce the likelihood of further crises in the future or measures, which could help to solve the current economic crisis. The conclusion summarizes the results of the analysis and answer the question if it is possible to avoid a financial crisis and the resulting economic recession or will come again and again?

Real estate sales significantly declined during and after the 2008 mortgage crisis. In the United States, real estate sales dropped 35% after the mortgage crisis. Guided by the attention, interest, desire, and action (AIDA) model, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies successful residential real estate organization managers use to mitigate sales decline in a postrecession environment. Three residential real estate organization managers in Southern Maryland and Northern Virginia participated in semistructured interviews. These participants are currently selling homes, worked in the real estate market before the 2008 mortgage crisis, and developed successful strategies to mitigate declining sales in a postrecession environment. The data collection process for this study included the semistructured interviews, review of archival documents, and member checking to explore successful strategies for mitigating declining sales for residential real estate organization managers. The data analysis included data coding, organizing, and making conclusions with the use of Yin's 5 phase process. During analysis, the 4 themes to emerge were customer service, consistent work ethic, innovation, and market specialization. By implementing the identified successful sales strategies, these residential real estate organization managers were able to mitigate a decline in sales in a postrecession environment. Real estate professionals may use these findings to decrease the delays in the home buying process and increase employees' sales performance. More home sales can improve local economies and the welfare of communities.

This paper uses multivariate DCC-GARCH model to investigate the volatility of dynamic correlation between MSCI Taiwan stock index and the USA, China, Japan , Asia and global stock market. The existence of stock market volatility asymmetry, volatility spread of infection and clustering effects also are analysed, while in case of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and triggered the global financial tsunami. It discusses the Taiwan stock market fluctuations and structural changes in the international markets and the market dynamics related to change of influence and change. The main findings are (1)The volatility of continuity between the spread of infection and the clustering effect between the Taiwan stock market and international market fluctuations, (2) During the global financial tsunami, the correlation between changes in the international market and the market Correlation of different dynamic fluctuations and structural changes occurring in different time point also show the impact of changes of individual markets (3)The correlation between MSCI Taiwan stock index and the USA, China , Japan, indicates that the impact of change of stock the Japanese stock market on the MSCI Taiwan stock index is low, while China and the MSCI Taiwan stock index-related enhances, (4) market structure changes, the MSCI Taiwan stock index and the global dynamic fluctuations in the market is still a significant, The visible impact of the shock oscillation is wide and return to equilibrium of adjustment is still ongoing.

A topical issue in financial economics is the development of appropriate stochastic dynamic models for banking items and behavior. The issue here is to fulfil the need to generalize the more traditional discrete-time models of banking activity to a Levy process setting. In this thesis, under the assumption that the loan market is imperfectly competitive, we investigate the evolution of banking items such as bank assets (cash, bonds, shares, Treasuries, reserves, loans and intangible assets), liabilities (demand deposits) and bank capital (bank equity, subordinate debt and loan loss reserves). Here we consider the influence of macroeconomic factors and profitability as well as its indicators return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). As far as bank assets are concerned, we note that loan pricing models usually reflect the financial funding cost, risk premium to compensate for the risk of default by the borrower, a premium reflecting market power exercised by the bank and the sensitivity of the cost of capital raised to changes in loans extended. On the other hand, loan losses can be associated with an offsetting expense called the loan loss provision (LLP), which is charged against Nett profit. This offset will reduce reported income but has no impact on taxes, although when the assets are finally written off, a tax-deductible expense is created. An important factor influencing loan loss provisioning is regulation and supervision. Measures of capital adequacy are generally calculated using the book values of assets and equity. The provisioning of loans and their associated write-offs will cause a decline in these capital adequacy measures, and may precipitate increased regulation by bank authorities. Greater level of regulation generally entail additional costs for the bank. Currently, this regulation mainly takes the form of the Basel II Capital Accord that has been implemented on the worldwide basis since 2008. It is clear that bank profitability is a major indicator of financial crises for households, companies and financial institutions. An example of this from the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis (SMC) is the U.S. bank, Wachovia Corp., who reported a big loss as from the first quarter of 2007 and eventually was bought by the world's largest bank, Citigroup, on 29 September 2008. A further example from the SMC is that both the failure of the Lehman Brothers investment bank and the acquisition in September 2008 of Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns by Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, respectively, were preceded by a decrease in profitability and an increase in the price of loans and loan losses. The subprime mortgage crisis is characterized by contracted liquidity in the global credit markets and banking system. The level of liquidity in the banking sector affects the ability of banks to meet commitments as they become due without incurring substantial losses from liquidating less liquid assets. Liquidity, therefore, provides the defensive cash or near-cash resources to cover banks' liability. An undervaluation of real risk in the subprime market is cascading, rippling and ultimately severely adversely affecting the world economy. The downturn in the U.S. housing market, risky lending and borrowing practices, and excessive individual and corporate debt levels have caused multiple adverse effects tumbled as the US housing market slumped. Banks worldwide are hoarding cash and showing a growing reluctance to lend, driving rates that institutions charge to each other on loans to record highs. Also, global money markets are inoperative, forcing increased injections of cash from central banks. The crisis has passed through various stages, exposing pervasive weaknesses in the global financial system and regulatory framework. The stochastic dynamics of the aforementioned banking items assist in formulating a maximization problem that involves endogenous variables such as profit consumption, the value of the bank's investment in loans and provisions for loan losses as control variants. In particular, we demonstrate that the bank is able to maximize its expected utility of discounted profit consumption over a random time interval, [t,r], and terminal profit at time r. Here the term profit consumption refers to the consumption of the bank's profits by dividend payments on equity and interest and principal payments on subordinate debt. The associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation has a smooth solution when the optimal controls are computed by means of power, logarithmic and exponential utility functions. This enables us to make a direct comparison between the economic properties of the solutions for different choices of the utility function. In keeping with the main theme of this thesis, we simulate the financial indices ROE and ROA that are two measures of bank profitability. We further discuss optimization with power utility where we show the convergence of the Markov Chain Approximation Method (MCAM) and the impact of varying the model parameters in the form of loan loss severity, P, and loan loss frequency, <f>. We investigate the connections between the banking models and Basel II capital accord as well as the current subprime mortgage crises. As a way of conclusion, we provide remarks about the main issues discussed in the thesis and speculate about future research directions. The contents of this thesis is based on 3 peer-reviewed journal articles (see [105], [106] and [107]) and 1 peer-reviewed conference proceedings paper (see [104]). In addition, the paper [108] is currently being prepared for submission to an accredited journal. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Applied Mathematics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.