A number of articles have documented that the classical event study methodology exhibits a bias toward detecting "effects", irrespective of whether such effects actually exist. This paper addresses this bias by presenting a new methodology that explicitly incorporates stochastic behaviors of the...

We characterize the classes of utility functions that are consistent with different notions of mean preserving spreads introduced in the literature. This gives rise to a unified approach and extension of some definitions of increasing risk, including the concepts of Rothschild and Stiglitz...

We extend the characterizations of increasing risks developed by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) to the case of unbounded probability distributions. We also consider the related notion of increasing risk about $\nu$ introduced by Landsberger and Meilijson (1990). Moreover, for some of the results...

Decisions about how to use an individual's age are particularly important under the Oregon Health Plan's pending employer mandate. This article summarizes the relationships between age and other important variables that impact health policy decisions, including a review of the legality of using...

Risk aversion can be defined either by the negative sign of the second derivative of the utility function or by the rejection of any mean-preserving increase in risk. The more recent notions of prudence and temperance have so far been defined exclusively by the sign of the third and the fourth...

Since Fishburn and Porter [1976], it has been known that a first- order dominant shift in the distribution of random returns of an asset does not necessarily induce a risk-averse decision maker to increase his holdings of that improved asset. To obtain the desired comparative statics result, one...

Although financial pricing models imply that profits of property- liability insurance firms should conform to an unpredictable time series process, cycles are widely reported. Some controversy exists as to whether the "underwriting cycle" is a mere accounting artifact or whether it has real...

This paper shows that a flaw exists in the logic behind the previously stated theoretical connections between utility theory and moment preferences. In fact, no such relationship exists. There is also a flaw in the logic that postulates that approximate normality can justify moment (e.g.,...

To date, the organizational structure literature has treated the ownership structure and distribution system aspects of organizational design independently of each other. We believe that a more complete and empirically better specified model should consider both aspects of organizational design...