T paper proposes a new methodology to infer investors’ expectations about the speed of leverage adjustment implicit in the prices of credit instruments. On average, the credit markets imply a fairly rapid annual speed of adjustment of 26% toward a firm’s predicted leverage. The speed varies considerably across partitions formed by the differential implications of the pecking order, market timin...

W propose a measure of managerial ability, based on managers’ efficiency in generating revenues, which is available for a large sample of firms and outperforms existing ability measures. We find that our measure is strongly associated with manager fixed effects and that the stock price reactions to chief executive officer (CEO) turnovers are positive (negative) when we assess the outgoing CEO a...

OBJECTIVE Use systematic review methods to quantify the association between prostatitis and prostate cancer, under both fixed and random effects model. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION Case control studies of prostate cancer with information on prostatitis history. All studies published between 1990-2012, were collected to calculate a pooled odds ratio. SELECTION CRITERIA the selection criteria are as ...

We use data on the largest U.S.-based franchised chains, measured by worldwide sales, from 1998 to 2007, to explore scale and scope (or spillovers) effects. Because franchised chains are fundamentally single-product or single-concept entities that usually continue to be developed separately when they belong to multi-chain firms, we can distinguish scale from scope effects much better than in mo...

It is shown that the critical (or deconfinement) temperature for the Nambu-Goto string connecting the point-like masses (quarks) does not depend on the value of these masses. This temperature turns out to be the same as that in the case of string with fixed ends (infinitely heavy immobile quarks).

This paper examines the ability of Board Members of the most important multilateral donor to developing countries, the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank, to influence IDA allocations toward their home countries. I show that a system of Bank staff ratings of individual countries' policies, which has become more important in IDA lending over time, has systematically re...

The macroeconomy and social policies can have substantial influences on poverty in the United States. In this paper, I investigate whether these influences differ across metro and nonmetro areas. To do so, using a 16-year panel of state-level data, I estimate state and year fixed effects models separately for metro and nonmetro areas to see if the effects of the macroeconomy and social policies...

Using nine years of personnel records from a regional grocery store chain in the United States, this study examines the effect of manager ethnicity on the ethnic composition of employment at the firm’s 73 stores. We estimate separate models with store fixed effects for several departments and job titles at each store. We first compare the rates at which Hispanic and white non-Hispanic managers ...

New railway legislation in Sweden has increased the need for transparent access charges on the Swedish railway network. We estimate cost functions for infrastructure operation, maintenance and renewal in the Swedish national railway network, using unobserved effects models and calculate marginal costs for railway infrastructure wear and tear. We find evidence of unobserved fixed effects at a tr...