Loan Requests Research Articles

It's the Economy, Jemmy

It's the Economy, Jemmy Joshua M. Smith (bio) Brian Arthur . How Britain Won the War of 1812: The Royal Navy's Blockades of the United States, 1812-1815. Rochester, New York: Boydell Press, 2011. xiii + 328 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendices, bibliographical references, and index. $99.00. The War of 1812 has become something of a minor industry to a number of historians hoping to cash in on bicentennial celebrations. It was a murky conflict, and every side seems to claim victory, with Americans and Canadians foremost among these. The only people who never make this claim are Native Americans (First Nations in Canada). Until recently, Britons remained almost entirely aloof from what they regarded as a sideshow to the wars against Napoleon. Brian Arthur has now stepped up, in his provocatively titled How Britain Won the War of 1812, to assert Britannia's triumph. Sweeping aside the folklore of frigate duels and Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans, his approach focuses on the economic aspects of the war. His conclusion is blunt and difficult to refute: Britain crushed the United States economically, much as it had Napoleon, and felt little or no repercussions itself. By the last year of the war, the American government was completely bereft of funds; its maritime trade had almost entirely ceased and, with it, the bulk of its tax base. New federal taxes were burdensome and incited resistance to the war effort; domestic efforts to raise loans came far short of the mark, and no foreign power was willing to provide loans to the beleaguered republic. Fortunately, Britain proved willing to grant a generous peace treaty. The United States had achieved none of the war goals set forth in Madison's 1812 speech, in which he asked Congress to declare war. Simply put, the war was a disaster for the United States, and the American interpretation of it as a victory a singularly strange conclusion and one that required a strange brew of twisted facts, emerging mythology, and republican ideology to concoct. Arthur does not dwell on American historical fancies. He is determined to present the war as an economic struggle, one of several examples of British economic might strangling opponents surely and steadily. In Arthur's take on the war, the bland responses of Dutch financiers to the American government's requests for loans play a more important role than the rather puny battles in the North American forests in delivering victory to the British. In the face of [End Page 54] overwhelming British naval might and an increasingly strict blockade, the export-driven American economy almost ceased to function. The predictable and feeble response by President James Madison (known as "Jemmy" to some) was an embargo in 1813 that utterly failed, just as had Jefferson's Embargo of 1807-9 and the other various forms of Non-Intercourse before the war. To be fair to Madison, according to Arthur, the republican ideology which he promoted and followed weakened seriously the American ability to fight a war because it had a very narrow tax base. Ninety percent of the federal government's income was derived from customs duties, which of course withered as the United States went to war against the world's greatest naval power and also suffered from Madison's self-inflicted embargoes. Arthur's focus is admirable: he sets forth the problem, defines it and considers alternative viewpoints, sets the background, provides analysis and a conclusion. His take is data-driven, and he generates lots of it, providing eight chapters of concise text for a total of just over two hundred pages, plus forty pages of valuable appendices. Chapter one gives the background to maritime blockades as a form of economic warfare. Chapter two considers the operational difficulties of sustaining a blockade in the age of sail. Chapter three gives the background to the War of 1812. Chapter four looks at the operations of the early years of the British blockade up until 1814, while chapter five considers blockade operations from 1814 to 1815. Chapters six and seven mirror the previous two chapters in chronology but consider the blockades' impact on American merchants and trade and on the federal...

Comparison of Credit Scoring Models on Probability of Default Estimation for Us Banks

This paper is devoted to the estimation of the probability of default (PD) as a crucial parameter in risk management, requests for loans, rating estimation, pricing of credit derivatives and many others key financial fields. Particularly, in this paper we will estimate the PD of US banks by means of the statistical models, generally known as credit scoring models. First, in theoretical part, we will briefly introduce the two main categories of credit scoring models, which will be afterwards used in application part - linear discriminant analysis and regression models (logit and probit), including testing the statistical significance of estimated parameters. In the main part of the paper we will work with the sample of almost three hundred US commercial banks which will be separated into two groups (non-default and default) on the basis of historical information. Subsequently, we will stepwise apply the mentioned above scoring models on this sample to derive several models for estimation of PD. Further we will apply these models to the control sample to determine the most appropriate model.

Patron-Driven Acquisition and Circulation at an Academic Library: Interaction Effects and Circulation Performance of Print Books Acquired via Librarians’ Orders, Approval Plans, and Patrons’ Interlibrary Loan Requests

Numerous publications on patron-driven acquisition (PDA) for print booksand similar materials have reported that patron-requested materials circulate more. Tying circulation to selector may be failing to address the complex of factors that contributes to items' circulation. In the present study, the authors revisit a PDA program's data and to determine whether PDA print books' circulation advantage persists when the potential interactions of several additional variables are taken into account. As with prior studies, library patrons were significantly better predictors of circulation than were librarians or approval plans. However, librarians proved to be significantly better predictors than were approval plans.

Textbooks and Interlibrary Loan

Students unhappy with the high cost of course textbooks are turning to the library to help alleviate the financial burden. There is no consensus, though, among academic libraries about how to respond to this demand. While the majority of libraries refuse to fill interlibrary loan requests for required textbooks, students continue to submit them. An evaluation was done to determine how frequently students use interlibrary loan to request textbooks at Wichita State University, the costs of such requests, and whether or not a textbook collection within the library offered a solution to this issue.

Interlibrary Loan Rates for Academic Libraries in the United States of America Have Increased Despite the Availability of Electronic Databases, but Fulfilment Rates Have Decreased

Objectives – To determine the number of interlibrary loan (ILL) requests in academic libraries in the United States of America over the period 1997-2008, and how various factors have influenced these rates. These factors included electronic database subscriptions, size of print journal and monograph collections, and the presence of link resolvers. Data were collected from libraries as both lenders and borrowers. The study also looked at whether the number of professional staff in an ILL department had changed during the period studied, and whether ILL departments led by a professional librarian correlated positively with rates of ILL.
 
 Design – Online questionnaire.
 
 Setting – Academic library members of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) ILL scheme in the United States of America.
 
 Subjects – A total of 442 academic library members of the OCLC ILL scheme.
 
 Methods – An electronic questionnaire was sent to 1433 academic library member institutions of the OCLC ILL scheme. Data were collected for libraries as both lending and borrowing institutions. Data were analyzed using a statistical software package, specifically to calculate Spearman’s rank correlations between the variables and rates of ILL.
 
 Main Results – Responses to the electronic questionnaire were received from 442 (31%) academic libraries. There was an overall increase in the number of ILL requests in the period 1997-2008. The number of ILL requests which were unfulfilled also increased during this period. There was a positive correlation between rates of ILL and all of the variables investigated, with the strongest correlations with size of print monograph collections and size of print journal collections. The numbers of staff in ILL departments remained relatively static during the period covered by the study, although the majority of staff working in ILL was composed of paraprofessionals. There was a weak positive correlation between numbers of ILL requests and whether ILL departments were headed by a professional librarian. 
 
 Conclusions – Access to full text electronic databases has not decreased the numbers of ILL requests in academic libraries in the United States of America. In fact, ILL requests have increased, probably due to the fact that students and staff of academic libraries now have access to a larger number of citations through online databases and other information sources. The authors suggest that the increase in unfulfilled ILL requests is also due to this increased access. Libraries with large print collections are more likely to receive ILL requests precisely because they have more material to lend out, and may make more ILL requests due to the research output of their presumably larger institutions. There may be a higher number of ILL requests fulfilled by departments headed by a professional librarian because a librarian has more knowledge of sources to fulfil requests.

Modeling operational risk for good and bad bank loans

We demonstrate the operational risk associated with type II errors in typical lending decisions made by banks. Type II errors occur when loan officers misidentify healthy borrowing firms that are not destined to default and wrongly reject their legitimate loan requests. These periodic mistakes presumably carry opportunity costs to the lending institutions in the form of a loss of profitable business. We also explore several forms of operational risk associated with the corresponding type I errors. These errors occur when loan officers fail to identify borrowing firms that will eventually go bankrupt, wrongly approving their illegitimate loan applications. These occasional miscalculations naturally result in future financial losses to the lending institutions. We illustrate severalmodels for these ordinary problems, analyze their expected failure rates, compare their functionality, and further propose additional complexities within these models for general use by banks and other lending institutions.

Employing Usage Data to Plan for an E-book Collection

The authors created a research method to identify local users’ needs and explored how well currently available e-book content might meet those needs. Using circulation records, interlibrary loan (ILL) requests, and in-house use as a gauge of patron demand during a three-year period, the study compared these records to e-book offerings from the major aggregators. The resulting data were analyzed by subject and publication date. The authors found that e-book content that might meet users’ needs was not uniformly distributed across disciplines and that more recent publications were more likely to have e-book equivalents. The highest percentage of e-book equivalents was for titles requested via ILL, suggesting that this might be the best place to begin e-book collecting. The results suggest that e-books may meet only a fraction of the demand for monographic scholarly output and that libraries cannot yet rely on e-book content to entirely supplant print, although e-book coverage is growing dramatically.

Google Scholar Usage: An Academic Library's Experience

Google Scholar is a free service that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly works and to connect patrons with the resources libraries provide. The researchers in this study analyzed Google Scholar usage data from 2006 for three library tools at San Francisco State University: SFX link resolver, Web Access Management proxy server, and ILLiad interlibrary loan server. Overall, the data suggested that Google Scholar had become a very useful resource in the library and was a significant addition to the library's collection of research databases. SFX data revealed requests from Google Scholar grew ten-fold from 2006 to 2011, and that Google Scholar became the top-ranked SFX source for requests in 2011. Library patrons favored Google Scholar over San Francisco State University's federated search tool, MetaLib, and it has become an important source for interlibrary loan requests. Analysis of San Francisco State University usage data will assist other libraries in their decisions about the implementation of Google Scholar.

Opening interlibrary loan to open access

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine interlibrary loan requests for open access materials submitted during fiscal years 2010 and 2011 and to determine the impact of open access materials upon fill rate for interlibrary borrowing requests.Design/methodology/approachBorrowing requests for open access materials were quantitatively analyzed and compared to total borrowing requests.FindingsDuring the period studied, borrowing requests for open access materials increased while overall requests held steady. As the number of requests filled with open access documents continues to rise, Indiana University‐Purdue University Indianapolis University Library is able to provide a service to users and cost savings for the library by utilizing this material. The difficulty users have in navigating the online information environment makes it unlikely that interlibrary loan requests will decrease due to the growing amount of open access material available.Originality/valueThe literature discussing the use of open access materials to fulfill ILL requests is limited and largely focuses on educating ILL practitioners about open access and providing suggested resources for locating open access materials. This research paper studies actual requests for open access materials and their impact on interlibrary loan.

Corporate Social Performance, Innovation Intensity, and Financial Performance: Evidence from Lending Decisions

ABSTRACTThis study examines how loan requests for intensifying corporate social performance (CSP) activities and loan requests for increasing innovation intensity affect loan officers' credit judgments and lending decisions. In addition, the impact of a balanced loan request for both CSP and innovation intensity was examined. An experiment was designed by manipulating the purpose of a loan request from a pharmaceutical company in order to create four alternative lending scenarios: (1) a full loan request for intensifying CSP activities; (2) a full loan request for increasing innovation intensity; (3) a loan request for a balanced investment in both CSP and innovation; and (4) a general purpose loan request (control group). The findings support that CSP investment is interpreted by loan officers as an indicator of superior corporate financial performance. However, no clear positive relationship between innovation intensity and lending decisions was found. These results are consistent with the view that lenders could be reluctant to fund innovation intensity initiatives because there may be a considerable time lag between this investment and its payoff. Contrary to expectations, a balanced loan request for both CSP and innovation was not interpreted by loan officers as the most favorable lending scenario for an innovative firm.

Scenario-driven approach for business process development

The development of services-based systems starts from defining business requirements to be implemented as high-level business processes. In this paper, we describe a scenario-driven approach for developing business processes specified as WS-BPEL descriptions. We aim for simplicity in the business level notation and leverage example-like modelling principles in order to enable process sketching. The first step in our approach is to identify the essential functional requirements for business processes. The requirements are modelled as simple scenarios, each of them defining a sample run through the process, i.e., required behaviour that the underlying service-based system should allow. The scenarios, specifying sent and received messages among the services, are synthesised into a state machine. The state machine is transformed into an initial process model given in UML activity model notation. To enable mapping into WS-BPEL code, the transformation exploit domain-specific rules, i.e., our target model consists of a subset of UML with WS-BPEL specific constraints and stereotypes. The initial process model can be further refined to enable generation of executable WS-BPEL descriptions. We apply the approach on two cases, a simple process for managing loan requests and an industry case study from a logistics provider are presented.

When the Pilot Is Over: Picking the Program and Making It Stick, Purchase on Demand at the University of South Florida

In 2008 the Interlibrary Loan department of the University of South Florida, Tampa, began a Purchase on Demand program, using interlibrary loan requests to supplement Collection Development practices. After three years the program was analyzed for effectiveness and compared to other programs currently in operation. To achieve a complete evaluation, interlibrary loan patrons were surveyed on their awareness and use of the Purchase on Demand program. This article combines the analysis of USF's program with recommendations gained through administration and evaluation of Purchase on Demand.

Interlibrary Loan Requests for Locally Available Materials: WorldCat Local’s Impact

Several studies have researched the reasons and patterns for academic library users’ interlibrary loan requests for materials already available at their college or university library. This study examines interlibrary loan statistics at the University of Delaware for four academic years to determine whether WorldCat Local impacts requests for locally available material. Data show that WorldCat Local does reduce this type of request, particularly when users are requesting returnable loans of materials such as books or audiovisual items rather than copies of articles.

Does the insurance effect of public and private transfers favor financial deepening? Evidence from rural Nicaragua

The literature suggests CCTs and remittances may protect poor households from income risk. We present a theoretical framework that explores how this ‘insurance’ effect can change households’ decision to apply for a loan via changes in credit demand and supply. Empirical evidence from poor rural households in Nicaragua shows CCTs did not affect loan requests while remittances increased them. The risk protection provided by remittances seems stronger, relative to CCTs, such that improvements on borrowers’ expected marginal returns to a loan or on creditworthiness more than offset decreasing returns to additional income. This suggests those transfers that best protect households from income risk favor financial deepening in the context of segmented markets.

The National Repository Library of Finland

The National Repository Library of Finland was founded in 1989 as a means of providing the most economical way of storing library material for all libraries in Finland. It also acts as a connecting link in the country's library network and a centre for interlending. The paper describes the cost savings that have been achieved (€3.5 million annually) by the use of this central facility. Interlibrary loan requests are processed within 24 hours of receipt. Physical copies are mailed to user libraries, and periodical articles are scanned and despatched electronically. Fulfilling an important function in national collection policy, the National Repository Library has allowed other libraries to concentrate on maintaining active local collections, in the knowledge that research material sent to the Repository Library can be made available to them quickly and efficiently. As repositories acquire more and more material they become print resources on a regional or national scale, leading to the possibility that in time they might come together in a network to create a Universal Repository Library.

Want credit? How your bank evaluates its corporate customers

AbstractCompanies often wonder about a bank's credit‐decision process. How is it decided to approve or reject a company's loan request? The author explains the five‐step process that many financial institutions use, and how companies can avoid potential problems when applying for credit. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Criteria for Assessing Small and Medium Enterprises’ Borrowers in Ghana

This study focused on developing an insight into the decision making process which lenders employ in granting loans to SME borrowers. Questionnaires were administered on selected bank branch managers of conventional banks, rural banks and savings and loans companies. Findings from this study has brought to the fore some interesting revelations. The results indicated that when loan managers are deciding on whether to accept or reject an SME loan application, intended purpose of loan, repayment of previous loan, repayment schedule, type of business activity, size of loan relative to size of business and availability of collateral, ranked highest on their criteria list. On the contrary, CVs of clients, government guarantee of loans, charges on assets and gearing ranked lowest on the criteria list in terms of importance. The relevant factors identified in this study showed that lenders took particular interest in risk when dealing with SMEs. This is not out of place, as every business seeks to make profit and thus they need to be sure of recouping their monies when they lend them out to small businesses. It is thus very necessary for SME borrowers to develop an understanding of the decision criteria used by financial institutions in order to increase the probability of getting their loan request approved by fulfilling the required criteria adequately.

A Study on Developing of Asset Pricing Models

This study introduces the development and modifications of the widely used standard capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Many modifications are applied to the model’s challenging financial variables such as: financial risk factors, liquidity risks, downside risks, risk of non expected events, and economic and operational risk factors. Efficiency of the model is increased when applying various challenging financial variables. As a result of the gradual CAPM developments, various new models will present better interpretations of market conditions in economic units and portfolio structure. Furthermore, this study will show the importance of applying the new models advantages and disadvantages for financial managers, financial analysts and investors. po? c.?x ?w vant factors identified in this study showed that lenders took particular interest in risk when dealing with SMEs. This is not out of place, as every business seeks to make profit and thus they need to be sure of recouping their monies when they lend them out to small businesses. It is thus very necessary for SME borrowers to develop an understanding of the decision criteria used by financial institutions in order to increase the probability of getting their loan request approved by fulfilling the required criteria adequately.

How to Stay Sane as a Dean or VP

How to Stay Sane as a Dean or VP

Five Years Later: Predicting Student Use of Journals in a New Water Resources Graduate Program.

Using citation analysis, the authors examined the journals cited in theses and dissertations over the first five years of the Water Resources Graduate Program at Oregon State University. These journal titles were compared to the titles predicted as being important in the 2003 Oregon State University Libraries new program (Category I) review. A preliminary core list of journals for this highly interdisciplinary program had been created for the Category I review from faculty publications, Journal Citation Reports, and Interlibrary Loan (ILL) requests. Through comparison of the citations in the students' works with the data compiled for the Category I, and a review of current ILL requests, the authors address whether the initial review predicted student use, which sources were most valuable for predicting use, and how analysis of student citations can add to the strength of the original core journal list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]