BACKGROUND This study aims to determine the association of some genetic polymorphisms in the relationship of air pollutants on the serum levels of thrombomodulin (TM) and tissue factor (TF) in a population-based sample of children and adolescents. MATERIALS AND METHODS This cross-sectional study was conducted among 110 participants (52.8% girls) with a mean age of 12.7 + 2.3 years, in Isfahan...

Consumer leverage can contribute to nancial crises such as the subprime mortgage crisis characterized by increased bankruptcy prospects and tightened credit access. This paper embeds nancial frictions in the mortgage contracts of home-buyers within a two-sector economy to show that although households are not production agents and may not start as highly leveraged as nancial institutions, their...

In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives for banks, depositors, and regulators in connection with bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based prompt resolution regime for insolvent banks may reestablish the incentive system and provide for econ...

In practice, credit risk is measured by one of the two di€erent methodologies. One measures the prices and sensitivities of the credit linked instruments. Another measures the required collateral or capital needed to cover a potential default loss. This paper introduces a pricing methodology, which also determines the required capital. Conventionally the value-at-risk method is used to determin...

This paper empirically compares a variety of ®rm-value-based models of contingent claims. We formulate a general model which nests versions of the models introduced by Merton (1974), Leland (1994), Anderson and Sundaresan (1996), and Mella-Barral and Perraudin (1997). We estimate these using aggregate time series data for the US corporate bond market, monthly, from August 1970 through December ...

The general expressions for the time-dependent ensemble averages of the second spatial moments ^A& and the effective dispersivities g, defined as (1/ 2m)(d^A&/dt) where m is the magnitude of the mean flow velocity m, are evaluated in order to study the effect of initial plume size on ^A& and g in three-dimensional heterogeneous isotropic aquifers under the first-order approximation to the parti...

BACKGROUND Cucumber (Cucumis sativus) belongs to the Cucurbitaceae family that includes more than 800 species. The cucumber genome has been recently sequenced and annotated. Transcriptomics and genome sequencing of many plant genomes are providing information on candidate genes potentially related to agronomically important traits. To accelerate functional characterization of these genes in cuc...