Search

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was designed for competitors to develop and deploy teams of autonomous robots to explore difficult unknown underground environments. Categorised in to human-made tunnels, underground urban infrastructure and natural caves, each of these subdomains had many challenging elements for robot perception, locomotion, navigation and autonomy. These included degraded wireless communication, poor visibility due to smoke, narrow passages and doorways, clutter, uneven ground, slippery and loose terrain, stairs, ledges, overhangs, dripping water, and dynamic obstacles that move to block paths among others. In the Final Event of this challenge held in September 2021, the course consisted of all three subdomains. The task was for the robot team to perform a scavenger hunt for a number of pre-defined artefacts within a limited time frame. Only one human supervisor was allowed to communicate with the robots once they were in the course. Points were scored when accurate detections and their locations were communicated back to the scoring server. A total of 8 teams competed in the finals held at the Mega Cavern in Louisville, KY, USA. This article describes the systems deployed by Team CSIRO Data61 that tied for the top score and won second place at the event.

We study the evolution of US mortgage credit supply during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the mortgage market experienced a historic boom in 2020, we show there was also a large and sustained increase in intermediation markups that limited the pass-through of low rates to borrowers. Markups typically rise during periods of peak demand, but this historical relationship explains only part of the large increase during the pandemic. We present evidence that pandemic-related labor market frictions and operational bottlenecks contributed to unusually inelastic credit supply, and that technology-based lenders, likely less constrained by these frictions, gained market share. Rising forbearance and default risk did not significantly affect rates on “plain-vanilla” conforming mortgages, but it did lead to higher spreads on mortgages without government guarantees and loans to the riskiest borrowers. Mortgage-backed securities purchases by the Federal Reserve also supported the flow of credit in the conforming segment.

We study the evolution of US mortgage credit supply during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the mortgage market experienced a historic boom in 2020, we show there was also a large and sustained increase in intermediation markups that limited the pass-through of low rates to borrowers. Markups typically rise during periods of peak demand, but this historical relationship explains only part of the large increase during the pandemic. We present evidence that pandemic-related labor market frictions and operational bottlenecks contributed to unusually inelastic credit supply, and that technology-based lenders, likely less constrained by these frictions, gained market share. Rising forbearance and default risk did not significantly affect rates on "plain-vanilla" conforming mortgages, but it did lead to higher spreads on mortgages without government guarantees and loans to the riskiest borrowers. Mortgagebacked securities purchases by the Federal Reserve also supported the flow of credit in the conforming segment.

Since the start of the financial crisis, we have seen an extraordinary lengthening of foreclosure timelines, particularly in states that require judicial review to complete a foreclosure but also recently in nonjudicial states. Our analysis synthesizes findings from several lines of research, updates results, and presents new analysis to examine the costs and benefits of judicial foreclosure review. Consistent with previous studies, we find that judicial review imposes large costs with few, if any, offsetting benefits. We also provide early analysis of the new mortgage servicing rules enacted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and find that these rules are contributing to even longer timelines, especially in nonjudicial states.

In this article, we examine the role of investors and occupant-owners in an urban context during the recent housing crisis. We focus on Chelsea, Massachusetts, because it is a dense city, dominated by multifamily housing structures with high rates of foreclosure for which we have particularly good data. We distinguish between occupant-owners and investors using local data, and we find that many investors are misclassified as occupant-owners in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Then, employing a competing risks framework to study ownerships during the period 1998 through mid-2010, we find that local investors, who tend to invest more in relation to purchase prices and sell more quickly, experienced approximately 1.8 times the mortgage foreclosure risk of occupant-owners, conditional on financing. Nonlocal investors have no statistically significant difference in foreclosure risk from occupant-owners. Nonetheless, those owners with subprime purchase mortgages (most of whom are occupant-owners) faced the highest foreclosure risk when house prices fell.

We explore several different explanations of the effect of foreclosures on neighboring properties using a dataset of transactions in Boston, for which we have rich data on the size and location of condominium associations. There is compelling evidence against a supply effect-nearby condo foreclosures in different associations, and even those within the same association but at different physical addresses, have little impact on condo sale prices. However, condos transact at average discounts of 2.4 percent when a foreclosure shares the same physical address. We view the results as indicating that investment externalities drive foreclosures' impacts on neighboring house prices.

Studies of foreclosure externalities have overwhelmingly focused on the impact of forced sales on the value of nearby properties, typically finding modest evidence of foreclosure spillovers. However, many quality-of-life issues posed by foreclosures may not be reflected in nearby sale prices. This paper uses new data from Boston on constituent complaints and requests for public services made to City government departments, matched with loan-level data, to examine the timing of foreclosure externalities. I find evidence that property conditions suffer most while homes are bank owned, although reduced maintenance is also common earlier in the foreclosure process. Since short sales prevent bank ownership, they should result in fewer neighborhood disamenities than foreclosures.

The authors evaluate laws designed to protect borrowers from foreclosure. They find that these laws delay but do not prevent foreclosures. They first compare states that require lenders to seek judicial permission to foreclose with states that do not. Borrowers in judicial states are no more likely to cure and no more likely to renegotiate their loans, but the delays lead to a buildup in these states of persistently delinquent borrowers, the vast majority of whom eventually lose their homes. They next analyze a right-to-cure law instituted in Massachusetts on May 1, 2008. Using a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the effect of the policy, they compare Massachusetts with neighboring states that did not adopt similar laws. They find that the right-to-cure law lengthens the foreclosure timeline but does not lead to better outcomes for borrowers.

In this paper we examine the role of investors and occupant-owners in an urban context during the recent housing crisis. We focus on Chelsea, Massachusetts because it is a dense city, dominated by multifamily housing structures with high rates of foreclosure for which we have particularly good data. We distinguish between owner-occupiers and investors using local data, and find that that many investors are misclassified as occupant-owners in the HMDA data. Then, employing a competing risks framework to study ownerships during the period 1998 through mid-2010, we find that local investors, who tend to invest more in relation to purchase prices and sell more quickly, experienced approximately 1.8 times the foreclosure risk of occupant-owners, conditional on financing. Non-local investors have no statistically significant difference in foreclosure risk from occupant-owners. Nonetheless, those owners with subprime purchase mortgages (most of whom are occupant-owners) faced the highest foreclosure risk when house prices fell.

This paper assesses the impact of the mortgage crisis on Chelsea, Massachusetts, a low-and moderate income community of 35,000 adjacent to Boston. After years of rapid growth, house prices started falling in 2005. According to our repeat-sales indices, by the end of 2009 prices had fallen by as much as 50 percent from their peak. Foreclosures have soared and lenders have repossessed or allowed short sales on more than 330 homes, resulting in a forced exit of at least one in 30 of the town's households. A large fraction of the foreclosed properties were twoor three-family homes, so the number of households affected by the crisis undoubtedly extends beyond the number of foreclosures. But there is some positive news. After a slow start, servicers appear to have become far more efficient at selling foreclosed properties, so the stock of real estate owned properties has been falling since 2008. For the most part, homeowners who bought prior to the peak of the boom have so far avoided selling in the moribund market and thus are poised to gain if and when the market recovers. In addition, the crisis has not prevented homeowners from maintaining and improving their properties: both the number and the dollar value of building permits have held up well even for those homeowners who have bought recently and likely have negative equity in their homes.