Without sacrificing tractability, we analyze the effect of fat-tailed events such as catastrophes on the optimal compensation contract between a principal and an agent. The optimal contract depends on all the moments and not just the variance.

A particular robust regression estimator has gained popularity among applied econometricians. We show that this estimator is inconsistent for the parameters of the conditional mean when the errors are skewed and heteroskedastic, and conclude that therefore its use cannot be generally recommended.

We consider a two-period model in which duopolists sell experience goods and practice behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD). We give general conditions for when firms should offer a lower price to existing customers (‘pay-to-stay’) or to new customers (‘pay-to-switch’). We also...

We re-examine the link between absolute prudence and self-protection activities. We show that the level of effort chosen by an agent with decreasing absolute prudence is larger than the optimal effort chosen by a risk-neutral agent if the degree of absolute prudence is less than a threshold that...

The coskewness–cokurtosis pricing model is equivalent to absence of any positive-alpha return for which the residual risk has positive coskewness and negative cokurtosis with the market. This parallels the CAPM and also the fundamental theorem of asset pricing.