Are fertility responses to local unemployment homogenous across sub-demographic groups? This paper investigates how changes in local unemployment rates affect household fertility decisions in England while taking sub-demographic differences into account. Recognizing that labor market status is a...

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to present a new methodology to enrich the analysis over data cubes in an OLAP system, allowing the system to add semantic interpretation to the query results adapted to the final user. Methodology: Defining a semantic translation of a given value regarding a...

in this paper we are interested in investigating the determinants of domestic violence. For this goal, we consider that many intra-household choices (on good consumption or choices among a set of alternatives) taken by single individuals produces negative externalities and conflict, which may...

In April 2007, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) issued debt for USD 7.5billion, the largest debt offering to date by a Latin American company. The conditions surrounding this issue, which was denominated and tradable in dollars, but payable in bolivars, were quite special, particularly when...

We study the default behavior of original issue high-yield bonds to answer the open question of how the probability of default changes over time. We use a flexible econometric method, the Cox proportional hazard, to model the default behavior of junk bonds over their life. The method allows us...

Why do firms in some industries exhibit very similar debt ratios, while firms in other industries do not? This paper examines the dispersion in leverage ratios among firms within an industry, and relates this dispersion to industry characteristics. We find that more concentrated industries and...

When searching for outside directors, the performance of the candidate as a manager of other firms is important. Using a sample of Venezuelan banks during a systemic crisis, we find that the outside directorships of chief executive officers (CEOs) are negatively affected by banks' performances,...

This study evaluates the capital-structure determinants of Latin American firms using a comprehensive sample covering seven countries. Firms in the region have debt levels similar to those of U.S. firms, which is puzzling, given that Latin American firms experience relatively lower tax benefits...

A commonly held view in corporate finance is that firms are less leveraged than they should be, given the potentially large tax benefits of debt. In this paper, I study the effect of firms' leverage on default probabilities as represented by the firms' ratings. Using an instrumental variable...