Recent events in the financial and insurance markets, as well as the looming challenges of a globally changing climate point to the need to re-think the ways in which we measure and manage catastrophic and dependent risks. Management can only be as good as our measurement tools. To that end,...

We use the classical model, a method for structured expert judgment (SEJ), to study the effects of breastfeeding on IQ. Data on the link between breastfeeding and IQ are available, e.g., the US National Longitudinal Study of Youth, however, questions about data quality and confounding mean...

Deep and shallow uncertainty are defined and contrasted with regard to messaging the uncertainty about climate change. Deep uncertainty is often traced back to the writings of Frank Knight, where in fact it simply meant subjective probability. Although Knight envisioned a scientifically grounded...

Regular vines or vine copula provide a rich class of multivariate densities with arbitrary one dimensional margins and Gaussian or non-Gaussian dependence structures. The density enables calculation of all conditional distributions, in particular, regression functions for any subset of variables...

This monograph is written for the numerate nonspecialist, and hopes to serve three purposes. First it gathers mathematical material from diverse but related fields of order statistics, records, extreme value theory, majorization, regular variation and subexponentiality. All of these are relevant...

Between 1990 and 2000 the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Commission of the European Communities conducted a joint uncertainty analysis of accident consequences for nuclear power plants. This study remains a benchmark for uncertainty analysis of large models involving high risks with...

The Oil Spill Commission's chartered mission - to “develop options to guard against … any oil spills associated with offshore drilling in the future” (National Commission 2010) - presents a major challenge: how to reduce the risk of low-frequency oil spill events, and especially...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on the economic impacts of natural disasters to inform both climate adaptation policy and the estimation of potential climate damages. It covers papers that estimate the short- and long-run economic impacts of weather-related extreme events as well as...

Floodplain land-use decisions are made by individuals in households, businesses, and local governments. Whatever the venue, the decisions made are the outcome of multiple interacting influences, with one being consideration of flood risk. The goal of a flood risk communication program may be to...

Between 1972 and 1994, the New England Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook five studies evaluating the benefits and costs of protecting natural valley storage (NVS) areas as a flood mitigation strategy in various watersheds. NVS lands function as natural reservoirs, temporarily...