[Excerpt] Periodic flows of life insurance company (LIC) funds into the mortgage market result almost entirely from acceptances of forward commitment contracts negotiated months, and often years, earlier. Thus, Jaffee (1972) and others (Bisignano, 1971; Lintner, 1976; Lintner et al., 1978; Pesando, 1974; Ribble, 1973; and Smith and Sparks, 1971) have considered forward commitment behavior as the appropriate foundation for developing supply-of-mortgage-fund equations in large-scale econometric models and for analyzing the portfolio behavior of LICs and other financial institutions involved in issuing mortgage commitments.