European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g. unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor insurance mechanisms....

Women entrepreneurs are known not only to reimburse loans swifter than men, but also to receive smaller loans. However, on average women have smaller-scope business projects and are poorer than men. A deeper investigation is thus required in order to assess the existence of gender discrimination...

Poor women have complex financial lives. They borrow from a variety of sources. So far, however, research has focussed only on formal borrowing as a source of women’s empowerment. This study examines whether type of borrowing matters to women. We differentiate between ‘easy loans’ – that...

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned...

In this article we investigate the impact of personal and organizational trust on the financial performance of companies over a period of time. The effect of trust on various economic and managerial transactions is being researched extensively over the last two decades but previous research did...

Starting from the structural model developed by Merton (1974) and the derived notion of distance-to-default, we study the determinants of credit default swap (CDS) spreads for a sample of European banks over a period from January 2006 to December 2011. In particular, we test variables that are...

This paper presents an alternative modelling of the term structure of the credit spreads under a structural approach. We rely upon the barrier option pricing frameworkto price a corporate zero-coupon bond with a stochastic present value of the recovery consistent with the evidence on the...

Currency and interest rate swaps are subject to a complex, two-sided default risk. Several theoretical papers have recently addressed the problem of pricing swap credit risk. We implement a recent credit risk pricing model in order to attempt to evaluate a line of research in theoretical credit...

Currency and interest rate swaps are subject to a complex, two-sided default risk. Although several theoretical papers have recently addressed the problem of pricing swap credit risk, the empirical literature is almost non-existent. This is the only study we know of that uses actual transaction...

Sovereign bonds are usually priced under the assumption that only the sovereign issuer may be responsible of their repayment. In some cases however, bondholders may legitimately expect to be repaid by more than one agent. For example, when a country breaks-up, successor states may agree to...