This research examines the economic origins of Islam and uncovers two empirical regularities. First, Muslim countries, virtual countries and ethnic groups, exhibit highly unequal regional agricultural endowments. Second, Muslim adherence is systematically larger along the pre-Islamic trade...

The paper clarifies the link between changes in risk aversion and the effect on the consumption discount rate. In a general framework that can cope with various forms of uncertainty, it is shown that the response of the consumption discount rate to a change in risk aversion depends on some...

Uncertainty is prevalent in the context of climate change impacts. Moreover, the distribution across the globe is not uniform. We analyze how climate risks could be reduced via an insurance scheme at the global scale across regions and quantify the potential welfare gains from such a scheme....

In this paper we characterize the preferences of a pessimistic social planner concerned with the potential costs of extreme, low-probability climate events. This pessimistic attitude is represented by a recursive optimization criterion à la Hansen and Sargent (1995) that introduces...

The risk of losses of income and productive means due to adverse weather associated to climate change can significantly differ between farmers sharing a productive landscape. It is important to learn more about how farmers react to different levels of risk, under measurable and unmeasurable...

Oil spills are a major cause of environmental concern, in particular for Europe. However, the traditional approach to the evaluation of the expected external costs of these accidents fails to take into full account the implications of their probabilistic nature. By adapting a methodology...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...