This paper aims to contribute to the scholarly debates and efforts to understand and diagnose corruption and its societal implications. It probes the ways in which certain informal, nonlegal practices and transactions are driven not always by kleptocracy, individual greed,or survival strategies;...

The present dissertation is twofold and takes up several issues in two separate and independent articles. In chapter II, the hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance with regard to aggregation biases in the underlying risk exposure of aggregated yield time series is presented. The...