In aggregate, state appropriations are the largest revenue source for public higher education in the United States. However, these appropriations have significantly declined over past decades, drawing serious concerns about the potential negative impact on schools and students. This paper...

This paper develops a new measure of state and local fiscal sustainability called the "trend gap," which is based on socioeconomic and other fundamental factors and removes the short-term influence of the business cycle. The paper estimates the trend gap and finds that the nationwide per capita...

Primary health care is accepted as the model for delivering basic health care to low income populations in developing countries. Using El Salvador as a case study, the paper draws on three data sets and a qualitative survey to assess health care access and utilization across public and private...

Sub-Saharan African states urgently need expanded and more dynamic private sectors, more efficient and effective infrastructure/utility provision, and increased investment from both domestic and foreign sources. Privatization is one way to address these problems. But African states have...

This paper applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of policy, both the levels and the changes, on wage differentials using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1977-1998. The results indicate that...

A credit default swap (CDS) is a financial contract in which the holder of the instrument will be compensated in the event of a loan default. When available, CDS's are used to monitor the credit risk of countries and companies. In this work we develop a closed form procedure to value a CDS in...

A tool that has been widely used to identify the state of financial conditions in a country are the financial conditions indexes, since they synthesize information from different variables in a single indicator allowing to identify the general behavior of financial conditions in a timely and...

The main aim of this work is to price defaultable bonds. In order to achieve this goal we link first hitting densities of Brownian motion with functionals of controlled diffusions. From a practical point of view examples of diffusions with this property are: Brownian motion with linear drift,...

We apply text analysis to Twitter messages in Spanish to build a sentiment- based risk index for the financial sector in Mexico. We classify a sample of tweets for the period 2006-2019 to identify messages in response to positive or negative shocks to the Mexican financial sector. We use a...

We show that countries that take on more international risk are rewarded with higher expected consumption growth. International risk is defined as the beta of a country's consumption growth with world consumption growth. High-beta countries hold more foreign assets, as predicted by the theory....