Regulated small-dollar installment lenders do not operate within Arkansas, but they do in all six bordering states. We can measure the effects of Arkansas' 17 percent interest rate cap because Arkansas residents obtain installment loans only from out-state lenders. On average, Arkansas residents...

In the U.S., Arkansas has the lowest interest rate cap on small-dollar installment loans, 17 percent. No small-dollar installment lenders operate within Arkansas, while they do in all six states bordering Arkansas. These facts provide a natural experiment to examine the effects of a binding...

We investigated CART performance with a unimodal response curve for one continuous response and four continuous explanatory variables, where two variables were important (i.e. directly related to the response) and the other two were not. We explored performance under three relationship strengths...

An alert-level system for communicating volcano hazard information to the aviation industry was devised by the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) during the 1989–1990 eruption of Redoubt Volcano. The system uses a simple, color-coded ranking that focuses on volcanic ash emissions: Green—normal...

Purpose: Health care institutions in many Western countries have developed preoperative testing and assessment guidelines to improve surgical outcomes and reduce cost of surgical care. The aims of this chapter are to (1) summarize the literature on the effect of preoperative testing on clinical...

Background: Theoretically, nursing homes should engage in advertising for the following two reasons: (a) to improve awareness of the services offered in a particular market and (b) to signal high-quality services. In this study, we build upon results from prior studies of nursing home...

Millions of Americans rely on small-dollar, non-bank-supplied credit products: payday, pawn, vehicle title, and personal installment loans from finance companies. Many features of these vital products, however, are not well understood. This book contains explanations of how these loans work,...