We consider four models of consumption that differ with respect to efficient risk-sharing and altruism. They range from complete markets with altruism to family risk-sharing. We use a matched sample of parents and independent children available from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to...

This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. We use a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality...

In what follows we provide a conceptually correct procedure for determining whether a risky project passes the "potential Pareto improvement" welfare criterion which forms the normative basis of cost-benefit analysis. In this approach the role of secondary markets in providing opportunities for...

Between 1810 and 1939, real per capita spending on patent medicines grew by a factor of 114; real per capita GDP by a factor of 5. The long-term growth and survival this industry is puzzling when juxtaposed with standard historical accounts, which typically portray patent medicines as quack...

This paper reports estimates for the ex ante tradeoffs for three specific homeland security policies that all address a terrorist attack on commercial aircraft with shoulder mounted missiles. Our analysis focuses on the willingness to pay for anti-missile laser jamming countermeasures mounted on...

We propose a new approach to the pricing and hedging of contingent claims under transaction costs in a general incomplete market in discrete time. Under the assumptions of a bounded mean-variance tradeoff, substantial risk and a nondegeneracy condition on the conditional variances of asset...

We determine the increase of the maximum risk over the minimax risk in the case that the optimally robust estimator for the false radius is used. This is done by numerical solution of the implicit equations which determine optimal robustness, for location, scale, and linear regression models,...

Credit risk refers to the risk of incurring losses due to unexpected changes in the credit quality of a counterparty or issuer. In this paper we give an introduction to the modeling of credit risks and the valuation of credit-risky securities. We consider individual as well as correlated credit...

We introduce the notion of a convex measure of risk, an extension of the concept of a coherent risk measure defined in Artzner et aL (1999), and we prove a corresponding extension of the representation theorem in terms of probability measures on the underlying space of scenarios. As a case...

This paper presents a general theory that works out the relation between coherent risk measures, valuation bounds, and certain classes of portfolio optimization problems. It is economically general in the sense that it works for any cash stream spaces, be it in dynamic trading settings, one-step...