This article reviews the history literature on the Champagne fairs and points to reasons why Avner Greif's (2006) model of collective responsibility and inter-city reprisals may not apply. First, with no substantial local community of merchants, mutual dissuasion could not offer credible...

We discuss the relevance of the volatility as a risk measure. By considering recent studies on tick by tick data and specific features of derivatives, we introduce alternative measures to take into account the time and volume effects, or the distributional asymmetry.