Welcome to the 62nd issue of the Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Science (JEFAS). This issue continues our tradition of presenting rigorous, double-blind peer-reviewed research that joins academic excellence with practical application. The papers gathered here move from the frontiers of financial inclusion and financial well-being in open finance ecosystems, through the attention dynamics of retail investors and the design of redistributive taxation under uncertainty, to the volatility of energy commodity markets. They also address the governance and innovation of capital-intensive firms, the relational foundations of customer engagement in services, the links between productive sophistication and capital market development, the labor-market consequences of parenthood in developing economies and the readiness of nations to host relocated global value chains. Together, these contributions offer valuable insights for researchers, practitioners and policymakers alike.
In their study, Alvarez-Franco et al. (2026a, b) ask which sociodemographic characteristics govern access to and use of digital financial services in Latin America and the Caribbean. Using the World Bank's 2021 Global Findex Database for 15 countries, they condense the survey's access and use indicators into a single index through principal component analysis and regress that index on gender, age, education, income, employment and country of residence. Digital inclusion rises with employment, education and income, falls with age and is higher where fintech penetration is deeper; the gender gap is stark, with 46.55% of women lacking a mobile account against 31.51% of men. The contribution is a composite measure of digital inclusion for a region the literature has barely covered, together with a warning that fintech alone cannot close these gaps where connectivity exclusion persists.
Alvarez-Franco et al. (2026a, b) address a problem of measurement: financial well-being is still captured mostly through self-reported surveys, even though it depends on how people actually manage money. Drawing on a proprietary dataset covering 432,695 clients of one of the largest banks in Latin America, which combines administrative, transactional, credit bureau and tax records with a survey module, they build a two-stage Financial Well-being Indicator over seven dimensions, estimated separately for five age groups and weighting objective components at 70% against 30% for perceptions. The weights track life cycle theory, with planning dominant in early adulthood and wealth peaking before retirement but depart from it in placing the heaviest debt burden in those same pre-retirement years. The contribution is the first such index built in a setting that approximates open finance.
Bustamante and Ubilla (2026) turn to the retail investor, asking whether attention to recommendations circulating on social media raises the propensity to hold equities, and whether digital financial literacy tempers that influence. Grounding the analysis in the attention theory of Barber and Odean (2008), they estimate logistic models with country fixed effects on 6,865 respondents to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/International Network on Financial Education (OECD/INFE) 2023 survey in Brazil, Finland, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. Attending to recommendations from strangers raises the probability of holding shares by around 12% points once literacy and socioeconomic controls enter, and the effect survives both instrumentation and propensity score matching. Digital literacy moderates that effect in only some of the four countries, negatively in the Philippines and positively in Saudi Arabia. The contribution is cross-country evidence that social media influence on investing is real but culturally contingent, which argues against a single regulatory template.
Vallarino (2026) asks how redistributive taxation can be designed when the informational premises of the Mirrleesian tradition fail, that is, when income is neither observable nor reliably declared and behavioral elasticities cannot be estimated with confidence. The proposal is to treat the structure of the economy as the missing information: individuals are nodes in a network whose links encode similarity in observable non-monetary attributes, a graph neural network converts that topology into embeddings read as sufficient statistics for classes of plausible income distributions, and tax rules are optimized over Wasserstein ambiguity sets so that welfare is evaluated under worst-case realizations. On two stylized economies calibrated to Latin American heterogeneity, the structural rule dominates both proxy-based scoring and non-graph machine learning benchmarks trained on identical observables. The contribution is to recast informational topology as itself a determinant of fiscal capacity.
Aladwani (2026) asks which macro-level forces govern price volatility in energy markets, and whether the answer is the same across fuels. The strategy pairs a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity–mixed data sampling (GARCH-MIDAS) specification, which separates short-run from long-run volatility, with an adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) penalty that lets 43 candidate predictors compete within a single model without the parameter proliferation that ordinarily defeats such exercises. Daily prices for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude, Henry Hub natural gas, Argus Petroleum International (API)2 coal and U3O8 uranium are matched against monthly fundamentals, financial, uncertainty and macroeconomic series from 2003 to 2024. The surviving predictors differ sharply by fuel: uncertainty and geopolitical risk govern oil and gas, coal responds to its own demand and supply alone, and uranium to demand and geopolitical risk. The contribution is a selection method that identifies fuel-specific drivers, and evidence that uncertainty has displaced physical balances at the center of oil and gas risk.
Mendiola and Talavera (2026) evaluate how board composition shapes innovation capacity in Latin America's metal mining sector, a setting defined by long investment cycles and intense socio-environmental scrutiny. Departing from linear specifications, they build a Mamdani-type fuzzy inference system in which ownership structure, board structure and demographic diversity feed a model that is defuzzified into an innovation index, applied to the 12 listed metal mining firms in Peru, Chile and Colombia. Promoter ownership contributes more than institutional participation, smaller boards outperform larger or highly independent ones and female participation correlates positively with innovation. The contribution is methodological: fuzzy logic recovers governance effects that linear models cannot in a population this small.
Ganaie et al. (2026) examine how relational bonds translate into customer engagement in hospitality, and whether customer psychological ownership carries that effect. Their conceptual contribution is to extend the conventional triad of financial, social and structural bonds with a fourth, a customization bond that captures the guest's capacity to shape the service offering. Estimating a reflective-formative model by partial least squares on 629 hotel guests in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, they find that relational bonds drive both engagement and psychological ownership, which in turn partially mediates the relationship, and that the customization and structural bonds carry the largest weights within the construct.
Villavicencio (2026) examines whether the sophistication of a country's productive base helps explain the depth of its capital market, and whether that role grows where institutions are weak. The argument is evolutionary and sequential: as firms accumulate capabilities and move toward complex, hard-to-imitate goods, their projects become longer, riskier and less suited to bank lending, while, for investors, complexity signals productivity and stability of demand. Competitiveness is measured by the economic fitness index and capital market development by stock market capitalization over gross domestic product (GDP), across an unbalanced panel of 98 countries between 1997 and 2022, estimated by fixed-effect instrumental variables. Fitness has a positive and significant effect, and its interaction with institutional quality is negative. That interaction carries the central claim: productive sophistication matters comparatively more where institutional conditions are less favorable, with regulatory quality the most influential component.
Doan et al. (2026) move the focus to the household, measuring how the birth of a first child reshapes women's employment in Vietnam across three decades of structural transformation. Lacking a long household panel, the authors apply a pseudo-event study design to the censuses of 1989, 1999, 2009 and 2019, building pre-birth periods by matching each parent to demographically similar non-parents slightly younger than themselves. Female employment falls by 12.1% in the year of the first birth and remains below its counterfactual eight years later, with no comparable response among men, and the initial drop widens from under 5% in 1989 to almost 20% in 2019. The penalty is steepest in Ho Chi Minh City and for women who are urban, better educated or recently migrated and smallest where grandparents live in the household. The contribution is the first systematic province-level estimate of the child penalty in a developing country, and evidence that industrialization has widened rather than narrowed it.
Finally, Levy Carciente et al. (2026) propose a readiness dashboard for national competitiveness in a global economy where security and institutional trust increasingly rival cost efficiency in location decisions. Following the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Joint Research Centre (JRC) (2008) handbook on composite indicators, they normalize 32 variables into four pillars for 124 countries: institutions, infrastructure, integration into global supply chains and inputs. Readiness rises monotonically with income, infrastructure shows the widest gap between rich and poor countries, and inputs emerge as the universal bottleneck. Because the weights can be rebalanced by productive activity, the dashboard avoids the trap of the average and serves policymakers as a strategic mirror.
These papers, together with those summarized in Chavez-Bedoya (2026), advance the theoretical and practical frontiers of economics and finance. We anticipate that these contributions will generate a robust global dialogue among all those dedicated to advancing knowledge in our field.
