Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article will show that...

This paper analyses vulnerability in Fiji, the Kyrgyz republic, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. In incorporating measures of vulnerability there is no major departure from the perspective of MDG1 Analyses of vulnerability, like that in the present paper, emphasize the fact that the debates around...

One of the hallmarks of a distressed economy is the spread between the nation's government bond yield and the yield of comparable U.S. Treasuries It is understood that this spread can be symptomatic of an important level of economic distress in the developing nations. Many believe that this...

Risk equity serves as the purported rationale for a wide range of inefficient policy practices, such as the concern that hypothetical individual risks not be too great. This paper proposes an alternative risk equity concept in terms of equitable tradeoffs rather than equity in risk levels....

Kenneth Arrow and Karl Borch published several important articles in the early 1960s that can be viewed as the beginning of modern economic analysis of insurance activity. This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions in insurance economics since that time. The review...

Modern society mitigates and transfers risks in a variety of ways, which range from catastrophe prevention and insurance solutions through to injustices of a minor and inconspicuous nature. We illustrate that the measures taken depend on the uncertainty about the risks in question, and involve...

We analyze optimal hedging contracts and show that although hedging aims at sharing risk, it can lead to more risk-taking. News implying that a hedge is likely to be loss-making undermines the risk-prevention incentives of the protection seller. This incentive problem limits the capacity to...

Derivatives activity, motivated by risk-sharing, can breed risk-taking. Bad news about the risk of the asset underlying the derivative increases the expected liability of a protection seller and undermines her risk-prevention incentives. This limits risk-sharing, and may create endogenous...