Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents. The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them if they are perceived to have failed. To be publicly sacked as a failure is painful, often severely so, but the pain is finite. Agents thus have loss...

We investigate the valuation of catastrophe insurance derivatives that are traded at the Chicago Board of Trade. By modeling the underlying index as a compound Poisson process we give a representation of no-arbitrage price processes using Fourier analysis. This characterization enables us to...

National governments have a legitimate role to play in the development of national strategies to support electronic commerce. It is not always clear, however, what any electronic commerce legislation should incorporate or how regulation of electronic commerce should be implemented. This paper...

In this paper we look at pricing stop-loss reinsurance contracts using an approximation technique similar to that of Basu (Ph.D. Thesis, London, 1999) and Rogers and Shi [Journal of Applied Probability 32 (4) (1995) 1077–1088] for processes with constant claims and the underlying stochastic...

This paper offers two main contributions. First, it shows how the Baxter and Jermann (1997) claim that, once we consider human capital risk, the international diversification puzzle is worse than we think, is based on an econometric misspecification rejected by the data. Second, it outlines how,...

Proceedings of a seminar series organised at the LSE Centre for Civil Society, edited by Stephen Yeo.

We propose a multiperiod model in which competitive arbitrageurs exploit discrepancies between the prices of two identical risky assets traded in segmented markets. Arbitrageurs need to collateralize separately their positions in each asset, and this implies a financial constraint limiting...

This paper flatly contradicts the common view that anyone can make it in modern Britain. Indeed, rather then weakening, the link between an individual's earnings and those of his or her parents has strengthened. An important part of the explanation is that the expansion of higher education has...

Between 1993 and April 1999 there was no minimum wage in the UK (except in agriculture). In this paper we study the effects of the introduction of a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in April 1999 on one heavily affected sector, the residential care homes industry. This sector contains a large number...