Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach...

This paper characterizes the choice between centralization and decentralization as a risk-return trade-off and examines it in a model that integrates ideas from committee-decisionmaking and portfolio theories. Centralization, by pooling expertise, rarely yields erroneous decisions; however, when...

This paper addresses two questions about the morality of warfare: (1) how much risk must soldiers take to minimize unintended civilian casualties caused by their own actions (“collateral damage”), and (2) whether it is the same for the enemy's civilians as for one's own. The questions take...