Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks, such as unconfirmed transfers, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated currencies as a means of payment but this competition is not...

This chapter addresses the history, use and significance of the term transaction costs. Few words in the economic language have been more abused or fought over and this is shown to result from the emergence of two distinct definitions and uses. The ‘Neoclassical’ definition rests on the...

Reclassification risk is a major concern in health insurance where contracts are typically one year in length but health shocks often persist for much longer. While most health systems with private insurers emphasize short-run contracts paired with substantial pricing regulations to reduce...

On March 11, 2011, the strongest ever recorded in Japan earthquake occurred which triggered a powerful tsunami and caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima nuclear plant. The latter was a “manmade” disaster having immense impacts on people’s life, health, and property, infrastructure, supply...

The study investigated the impacts of mental health problems or disorders on wages using the instrumental variable approach. The European Community Household Panel (ECHP) data set of some selected European Countries for two years (2000 and 2001) was used. The study was theoretically justified by...

Machine Learning algorithms are becoming widely deployed in real world decision-making. Ensuring fairness in algorithmic decision-making is a crucial policy issue. Current legislation ensures fairness by barring algorithm designers from using demographic information in their decision-making. As...

In standard models of contracts, efficient incentives require the promisor to pay damages for non-performance and the promisee to receive no damages. To give efficient incentives to both parties, we propose a novel contract requiring the promisor to pay damages for nonperformance to a third...

This paper studies the design of mechanisms that are robust to misspecification. We introduce a novel notion of robustness that connects a variety of disparate approaches and study its implications in a wide class of mechanism design problems. This notion is quantifiable, allowing us to...

We show that the quotient of Levy processes of jump-diffusion type has a fat-taileddistribution. An application is to price theory in economics, with the result that fat tails ariseendogenously from modeling of price change based on an excess demand analysis resulting in aquotient of arbitrarily...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....