Economic losses caused by tropical cyclones have increased dramatically. It can be assumed that most losses are due to increased prosperity and a greater tendency for people to settle in exposed areas, but also that the growing incidence of severe cyclones is due to climate change. This paper...

Tropical cyclones that make landfall on the coast of the USA are causing increasing economic losses. It is assumed that the losses are largely due to socio-economic developments, i.e. growing wealth and greater settlement of exposed areas. However, it is also thought that the rise in losses is...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

In the past decades, risk management in the financial community has been dominated by data-intensive statistical methods which rely on short historical time series to estimate future risk. Many observers consider this approach as a contributor to the current financial crisis, as a long period of...

This study models maximum temperatures in Switzerland monitored in twelve locations using the Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) distribution. The parameters of the GEV distribution are determined within a Bayesian framework. We find that the parameters of the underlying distribution underwent a...