Severe natural catastrophes in the early nineties have brought about a lack of financial capacity in the catastrophe line of the global reinsurance market. The finance industry reacted to this situation by issuing innovative products designed to spread the excess risk more widely among...

The paper reviews the evolution in insurance economics over the past 25 years, by first recalling the situation in 1973, then presenting the developments and new approaches which flourished since then. The paper argues that these developments were only possible because steady advances were made...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of risk taking in the domain of losses. The experiments are conducted with students in several universities during introduction rudiments to expected utility theory and risk behaviour. The results are partly compatible with expected utility...

In practical portfolio choice models risk is often defined as VaR, expected shortfall, maximum loss, Omega function, etc. and is computed from simulated future scenarios of the portfolio value. It is well known that the minimization of these functions can not, in general, be performed with...

Every year, riots cause a substantial number of fatalities in less-advanced countries. This paper explores the role of agricultural output shocks in explaining riots. Our theory predicts a negative relationship between the level of rioting and the deviation of the actual output from the average...