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This article seeks to determine what factors are most important in the home equity decisions of older homeowners. A binomial probit multivariate regression technique is applied to pooled cross-sectional data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results indicate that demographic factors, such as retirement, marital, and health status, are much more important determinants than financial factors, such as income, financial assets, and housing costs. The results also indicate that factors correlated with attachment to the home play a relatively large role. The results suggest that governmental strategies that make home ownership more affordable for the elderly may have little effect on their propensity to remain in their home and that programs that treat nonfinancial aspects of elderly home ownership may be more effective.

This paper examines the effects of finanacial, demographic and housing variables on older homeowners' propensity to make a variety of housing changes. Pooled cross-sectional data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics is used in a multinomial logit framework. The results indicate that demographic factors are much more important than financial factors in explaining housing changes by older homeowners. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

This article explores the reasons that schools choose to group their students by ability. A mathematical model suggests that high diversity of achievement and a large number of students in a school will cause a school to be more likely to group. Less legitimately, some schools may choose to use ability grouping to segregate students by race or class within a school.The data used in this study come from the 1992 NAEP 8 th grade Mathematics Assessment. Cross-tabulations suggest that ability grouping is correlated with diversity of student achievement, the number of students, racial diversity, and low levels of poverty. The mean achievement of students and school spending levels do not have much correlation with the schools' tracking decisions. Logit regressions indicate that the number of students in a school and its racial diversity are most important, and that other factors (most notably the diversity of achievement) are not. These results lend credence to those who suggest that grouping is not necessarily done for academic reasons, but rather is a subtle way to segregate by race or class.