Premiums and benefits associated with traditional life insurance contracts are usually specified as fixed amounts in policy conditions. However, reserve-dependent surrender values and reserve-dependent expenses are common in insurance practice. The famous Cantelli theorem in life insurance...

Counterparty default risk might hamper trade and trigger a financial crisis. The introduction of a central clearing counterparty (CCP) benefits trading but pushes systemic risk into CCP default. Standard risk management strategies at CCPs currently overlook a risk associated with crowded trades....

The business performance of firms in the creative high-tech sector shows much variation. This paper examines whether the geographical location of such business firms influences the performance of these firms. The overarching analysis framework of this paper emerges from the recently developed...

This paper examines how a radical technological innovation affects alliance formation of firms and subsequent network structures. We use longitudinal data of interfirm R&D collaborations in the biopharmaceutical industry in which a new technological regime is established. Our findings suggest...

This paper focuses on a new concern in the small firm’s literature, namely what makes a small firm stay in business for a long time. It reflects a change in economic policy, away from an emphasis on volume of start-ups to an emphasis on quality of start-ups. The basic hypothesis is that...

Fragmentation of production into more and more complex supply chains is a prominent feature of globalisation. It implies that transaction costs as part of total costs of ownership carry a large weight in procurement decisions. An analysis of the various types of transaction costs is also...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversication strategies as applied to a set of 17 years of monthly hedge fund index returns on a set of ten market indices representing 13 major hedge fund categories, as compiled by the EDHEC Risk Institute. The...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies as applied to a set of daily arithmetically compounded returns on a set of ten market indices representing the major European markets for a nine year period from the beginning of 2005 to the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Structural Change and Economic Dynamics</I>, 2013, 24, 141-156.<P> We address the notion of dynamic, endogenous diversity and its role in theories of investment and technological innovation. We develop a formal model of an innovation arising from the...</p></i>

We consider a model for a serial supply chain in which production, inventory, and transportation decisions are integrated, in the presence of production capacities and for different transportation cost functions. The model we study is a generalization of the traditional single-item economic...