The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT) established the Industries of the Future (IOF) program to increase energy efficiency, reduce waste production and to improve competitiveness, currently focusing on nine sectors. The IOF is a partnership strategy...

The Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT) within the US DOE has recently initiated the Industrial Waste Reduction Program, which is designed to reduce industrial energy use and pollution by reducing the amount of waste materials generated. The Program's primary focus is to develop and...

Approximately a hundred years ago the petrochemical industry was in its infancy, while the chemical industry was already well established. Today, both of these industries, which are almost indistinguishable, are a substantial part of the makeup of the U.S. economy and the lifestyle we enjoy. It...

Retail agrichemical dealers have become increasingly familiar with the concept of containment over the past several years. Currently, containment regulations are in place in 13 states, and are being drafted in 7 others. Agrichemical dealers in these states will be required to assess the...

The incentives for establishing and the expertise for implementing successful waste minimization programs can be found in every company. The “in-house” expertise that discovers, designs, builds and manages manufacturing processes understand chemicals and chemical processes, and are the best...

My dissertation aims at understanding the financing and investment decisions of firms. It contains two chapters.Chapter One studies the currency composition of debt for firms in emerging economies. Using a dataset of traded Mexican firms, I document two stylized facts about firms in the...

What is the cross-sectional relationship between financial leverage and expected equity returns? How is the empirical relationship associated with firm's financial decisions? This dissertation investigates the potential explanations for the flatness relation between financial leverage and...

We embed a structural model of credit risk inside a dynamic continuous-time consumption-based asset pricing model, which allows us to price equity and corporate debt in a unified framework. Our key economic assumptions are that the first and second moments of earnings and consumption growth...

The availability of a unique data set of financially distressed firms enabled this study to apply the dynamic capital structure adjustment model to a study of capital structure. In addition, the factors driving capital structure adjustment of financially distressed and of healthy firms were...

Tax planners often choose debt over equity financing. As this has led to increased corporate debt financing, many countries have introduced thin capitalization rules to secure their tax revenues. In a general capital structure model we analyze if thin capitalization rules affect dividend and...