Engineered nanomaterials: risk perception,regulation and insurance

Concerns surrounding the health risk of engineered nanomaterials, effective regulation and the lack of specifically tailored insurance products for the nanotechnology sector are putting the industry’s long-term economic viability at risk. From the perspective of the underwriter, this article speculates on the relationship between risk perception, regulation and insurability. In the nanotechnology sector, regulators are currently failing to keep pace with innovation, and insurers generally lack guiding principles for underwriting occupational risk from nanomaterial exposure. Such vulnerabilities when combined with misguided risk perceptions can lead to the overpricing of risk transfer and ill-conceived regulatory initiatives, thus potentially exhausting resources and stifling innovation in the sector. In the absence of well-developed regulatory protocols, the insurance industry has, and will continue, to occupy a key role as an effective lobby in terms of improved risk management practice. We suggest that the insurance industry will increasingly rely on control banding frameworks and ‘risk mitigation at source’ methods developed in conjunction with their clients to manage severe acute diversifiable risks. Long tail risk will continue to represent a serious challenge to insurers and regulators. In the meantime, insurers will have to bridge their current needs with improvised solutions. As an example of one possible solution, we outline a framework that utilizes financial instruments to hedge an insurer’s exposure to uncertain estimates of these long-term risks.     

The value relevance of major media advertising expenditures: Some U.K. evidence

This study examines whether ACNielsen MEAL major media advertising expenditure measures, that are publicly available at a cost, have value relevance. Our results suggest that these advertising-expenditure measures are positively associated with market value. We also find little difference in the value relevance of these expenditures among different sizes of firms. Value relevance is found to be present only for nonmanufacturing firms. This suggests that the costly information provided by ACNielsen MEAL surveys may be potentially useful to market participants in valuing firms, at least for nonmanufacturing firms.     

Is money an omitted variable in the production function? Some further results

In recent years, numerous studies have emphasized the role of real balances in the production function in terms of money being useful: as an intermediate good; as liquid reserves for investment; and also serving as a link between aggregate supply and the nominal interest rate. In this paper we report new Canadian empirical evidence regarding the important role of money in the production process of aggregate manufacturing industries based on a flexible translog cost function approach. In general, our results support the hypothesis that money is an important factor in the production function and that there are potential supply side effects of a change in the interest rate.     

Portfolio selection in a lognormal securities market

Conclusion This paper, therefore, once again establishes the usefulness of the two parameter distributions in the analysis of portfolio selection and taxation. Assuming a lognormal securities market and a chance-constrained portfolio choice model, we derive the well known results of portfolio separation and the effects of taxation which were earlier obtained under more restrictive mean-variance assumptions.This paper, an earlier version of which was presented at the 8th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Stanford University, August 27–31, 1973, is based on a chapter of the author's Ph. D. thesis (Ahsan, 1974). The author is grateful to S. Ahmad, A. B. Atkinson, C. J. Bliss, D. W. Butterfield, A. L. Robb, T. Russell and W. M. Scarth for helpful comments.     

The distributional effect of a large rice price increase on welfare and poverty in Bangladesh

This paper studies the distributional effect of a sharp rice price increase on welfare and poverty in Bangladesh. We employ household consumption data and include the indirect effect of price responses to estimate the welfare loss. Our findings suggest that the estimated welfare effect can be misleading if household responses to rice consumption and production are ignored. This study further supports the hypothesis that the poor are the main victims of such a shock. Our examination also indicates that a higher rice price may increase or decrease the poverty head‐count ratio, depending on the choice of the poverty line, but worsens the country's poverty situation when it is measured by the per capita consumption gap. Our analysis reveals that the government can play a central role to prevent and mitigate such shocks, particularly in the medium to long run. On the methodological side, we observe that consumption provides a more consistent outcome across different methods of analysis than household income.     

Spillover across Eurozone credit market sectors and determinants

We examine spillover and its determinants among Eurozone sector level credit markets using time and frequency domain spillover approaches. Based on network theory and connectedness analysis, we identify the sectors that are major transmitters and receivers of spillover during normal and crisis periods. The rolling window analysis shows that short-run spillover among credit market sectors intensifies during global and Eurozone crisis periods. Further, using Bayesian model averaging, we find that overall financial conditions and stock market volatility are the main drivers of total and sector-level spillover. Our findings have important implications for policymakers and investors interested in Euro-area credit risk at the sector level.     

The International Transmission of Money Market Fluctuations

This study analyzes the interdependence of money markets in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The authors estimate a vector-autoregression system using daily data on three-month money market rates from December 31, 1979, through February 28, 1990. Consistent with the notion of informational efficiency, money markets respond very rapidly to a shock in any one country. The U.S. market plays a leading role, in that the after-effects of a shock there are much stronger and last much longer than those of a shock elsewhere. In contrast with previous studies on stock markets, the responses are larger and more persistent, the markets are less interdependent, and the U.S. market is relatively less influential.