In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability—the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

An expected utility based cost-benefit analysis is in general fragile to its distributional assumptions. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the utility function of the expected utility model to avoid this. The conditions ensure that expected (marginal) utility remains finite also...

Given the possibility to modify the probability of a loss, will a profit-maximizing insurer engage in loss prevention or is it in his interest to increase the loss probability? This paper investigates this question. First, we calculate the expected profit maximizing loss probability within an...

This paper presents an application of a recently developed approach by Matteson and James (2012) for the analysis of change points in a data set, namely major financial market indices converted to financial return series. The general problem concerns the inference of a change in the distribution...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>Siam Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (2011). Volume 32, issue 3, pages 665-684.<P> A sequence of real numbers (<I>x_n</I>) is Benford if the significands, i.e. the fractionparts in the floating-point representation of (<I>x_n</I>), are distributed...</i></i></p></i>

We provide estimates of the rebound effect for car transport in Denmark, using a rich data set with individual household data on car use, fuel efficiency, and car as well as household characteristics. A demand model is estimated in first differences; the availability of households in the sample...

We model and measure simultaneous large losses of the market value of insurers to understand the impact of shocks on the insurance sector. The downside risk of insurers is explicitly modelled by common and idiosyncratic risk factors. Since reinsurance is important for the capacity of insurers,...

This paper features the application of a novel and recently developed method of statistical and mathematical analysis to the assessment of financial risk: namely Regular Vine copulas. Dependence modeling using copulas is a popular tool in financial applications, but is usually applied to pairs...

This paper features an application of Regular Vine copulas which are a novel and recently developed statistical and mathematical tool which can be applied in the assessment of composite financial risk. Copula-based dependence modelling is a popular tool in financial applications, but is usually...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...