Leptokurtosis, or the risk lurking in “fat tails,” poses the deepest epistemic threat to economic forecasting. Parametric value-at-risk (VaR) models are extremely vulnerable to kurtosis in excess of the levels associated with a normal, Gaussian distribution. This article provides...

Civil monetary penalties play a vital role in federal law. The Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-410, prescribes rules for the regular adjustment of federal civil monetary penalties in response to inflation. Three statutory defects have undermined the...

The failure of individual firms in the banking industry poses a unique threat to the entire economy. Emerging wisdom on systemic risk has identified two shortcomings in traditional regulatory approaches, all of which failed to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008-09. First, static measures of...

Human capital, like any other form of wealth, lends itself to analysis through the tools of mathematical finance. No less than in other forms of enterprise, human capital formation involves risk. Returns on human capital and the risks inherent in its formation are affected by leverage. This is...

It is no longer credible to speak of a single “law and economics” movement. Rather, there are multiple schools of thought, each applying economic analysis of law in a distinct way and none commanding widespread acceptance. Chaos would seem the natural result of any attempt to marry...

In principle, neither the global environment nor personal health should come down to gambling. In practice, however, both the law of global biodiversity protection and the constitutional debate on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) rest on astoundingly risk-seeking...

It makes far more economic sense to prepare for disaster in advance than it does to stage heroic relief efforts after calamity strikes. For reasons rooted in politics and emotion, the law does exactly the opposite. Ad hoc relief, as expensive as it is spontaneous, dominates disaster law and...

The Gini coefficient remains a popular gauge of inequality throughout the social and natural sciences because it is visually striking and geometrically intuitive. It measures the “gap” between a hypothetically equal distribution of income or wealth and the actual distribution. But not all...

Despite the rise of multi-factor models emphasizing value, firm size, and momentum, beta remains the primary measure of risk in asset pricing. Designed to define systematic risk, net of idiosyncratic risk that can be neutralized through diversification, beta combines a measure of volatility with...

Actual investor returns from mutual funds lag behind hypothetical returns based on a fixed initial investment and reinvestment of all distributions. This gap arises from behaviorally driven errors in timing. The nonproprietary literature on this performance gap has emphasized the relationship of...