More than thirty years ago, Charnes, Cooper and Schinnar (1976) established an enlightening contact between economic production functions (EPFs) -- a cornerstone of neoclassical economics -- and information theory, showing how a generalization of the Cobb-Douglas production function encodes...

The objective of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the driving forces of a life insurance company. More specifically, the issues of the duration and convexity of insurance liabilities and equity are addressed. These issues deserve a careful rethinking given the recent...

This paper provides a continuous-time analysis of the optimal insurance demand by individuals. A joint treatment of the insurance, consumption and portfolio decisions is presented using a framework à la Merton (1969, 1971). The individual optimal insurance demand is explicitly derived under the...

Although risk aversion has been used in economic models for over 275 years, the past few decades have shown how higher order risk attitudes are also quite important. A behavioral approach to defining such risk attitudes was developed by Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006), based upon simple lottery...

This paper examines the different factors that have contributed to the subprime mortgage credit crisis: the search for yield enhancement, agency problems, lax underwriting standards, failure by the rating agencies to identify a changing environment, poor risk management by financial...

[fre] Dans quelle mesure les faits récents en France conforteraient une opinion largement répandue parmi les économistes français, qui tendrait à rejeter les thèses traditionnelles de l'inflation au profit d'explications dont l'origine serait structurelle ou sectorielle ? Nous avons tenté...

We consider random wealth of the multiplicative form xy, where x and y are statistically independent random variables. We assume that x is endogenous to the economic agent, but that y is an exogenous and uninsurable background risk. Our main focus is on how the randomness of y affects...