Internationally operating firrns naturally face the decision whether or not to hedge the currencyrisk implied by foreign investments. In a recent paper, Bos, Mahieu and van Dijk (2000) evaluatethe returns from optimal and alternative currency hedging strategies, for a series of 7 models,using...

An expected utility based cost-benefit analysis is in general fragile to its distributional assumptions. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the utility function of the expected utility model to avoid this. The conditions ensure that expected (marginal) utility remains finite also...

Economic problems such as large claims analysis in insurance and value-at-risk in finance, requireassessment of the probability P of extreme realizations Q. This paper provided a semi-parametricmethod for estimation of extreme (P, Q) combinations for data with heavy tails. We solve the...

We develop a novel argument why better public information can help countries to insure against idiosyncratic risk. Representative agents of developing and industrial countries receive public and private signals on their future income realization and engage in risk-sharing contracts with limited...

Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether or these cycles coincide. Recent papers_new suggest by their empirical research set-up that they do, or at least that defaults and credit...

In the search for effective pesticide risk management tools, the design of pesticide risk indicators is nowadays receiving increasing attention as a complement to more established regulatory strategies. In the present paper, we apply some recently developed pesticide risk indices and test their...

We model and measure simultaneous large losses of the market value of insurers to understand the impact of shocks on the insurance sector. The downside risk of insurers is explicitly modelled by common and idiosyncratic risk factors. Since reinsurance is important for the capacity of insurers,...

Under the new Capital Accord, banks choose between two different types of risk management systems, the standard or the internal rating based approach. The paper considers how a bank's preference for a risk management system is affected by the presence of supervision by bank regulators. The model...

The paper studies risk mitigation associated with capital regulation, in a context when banks may choose tail risk assets. We show that this undermines the traditional result that higher capital reduces excess risk-taking driven by limited liability. When capital raising is costly, poorly...