We consider contracts to purchase assets by means of streams of payments over time, with the asset as security. These give the purchaser an option not present if all payment is made up front, the option of stopping payments and delivering the asset in satisfaction of the remaining debt. We argue...

It has been said that insurance is the last of the financial services to accept radical change (Denney [1995-1996]). Yet there has been a fundamental shift in the geographic location and in the organization of the reinsurance industry in the last six years (Chichilnisky [1996b]). Global...

New risks seem to be an unavoidable in a period of rapid change. The last few decades have brought us the risks of global warming, nuclear meltdown, ozone depletion, failure of satellite launcher rockets, collision of supertankers, AIDS and Ebola. A key feature of a new risk, as opposed to an...

In international circles. the concem of the day is with the state of the world economy. There is a general appreciation ofthe severity ofthe problem, but no widespread agreement about either diagnosis or solutions. We shall focus here on a particular set of topics that have emerged as major...

The paper studies a two-region economy, with two sectors and three factors of production: oil, capital and labor. The South exports oil in exchange for industrial goods from the North. There is a net capital inflow to the South. This equals the difference between its export revenues and import...

We study a growth model with an environmental asset which is a source of utility and an input to consumption and production. The stock of this asset follows its own ecological dynamics, which are affected by economic activity. We study the implications of an approach to ranking sequences of...

We review the optimal pattern of carbon emission abatements across countries in a simple multi-country world. We model explicitly the fact that the atmosphere is a public good. Within this framework we establish conditions for it to be necessary for optimality that the marginal cost of abatement...