Immobiliencontrolling — Optimierung der immobilienbezogenen Kosten durch Gründung einer Generalmietgesellschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung Dipl.-Ing. (univ.) Michael Belau ist Director und Head of Rental Management Dipl.-Wirtschaftsing. (FH) Michael Schildger ist Vice President und Head of Finance Dr. Verena Sturm ist Manager Corporate Real Estate Services     

An Option-Pricing Approach to the Costs of Export Credit Insurance

This article investigates the relationship between a debtor country's external financial indicators and the costs associated with the insurance of export credits to that country. For this purpose a stylized model of export credit insurance (ECI) is developed, the central idea being that ECI is similar to a contingent claim such as a European put option. Thus, tools from option pricing theory were used to calculate the price of ECI, implying that not only the current financial position but also the volatility of the changes in that position determine such costs. The empirical results of a statistical analysis of the premium rates for ECI, applied by a private export credit insurer to seventy-seven developing countries during 1993, provide some support for these hypotheses. In particular, the reserves-over-imports ratio of a debtor country and the volatility of the rates of change of this ratio appear to contribute significantly to the premium rates that apply to that country. Thus, the article provides evidence that option pricing parameters do play role in practical insurance pricing, even if this pricing is not explicitly based on these parameters. Premium rates are set as if an underlying option market operated. Thus, the trade of countries with volatile external financial positions is saddled with higher costs than that of countries with more stable positions.     

On optimality in intergenerational risk sharing

Summary. This paper defines and studies optimality in a dynamic stochastic economy with finitely lived agents, and investigates the optimality properties of an equilibrium with or without sequentially complete markets. Various Pareto optimality concepts are considered, including interim and ex ante optimality. We show that, at an equilibrium with a productive asset (land) and sequentially complete markets, the intervention of a government may be justified, but only to improve risk sharing between generations. If markets are incomplete, constrained interim optimality is investigated in two-period lived OLG economies. We extend the optimality properties of an equilibrium with land and give conditions under which introducing a pay-as-you-go system at an equilibrium would not lead to any Pareto improvement. Received: October 5, 1998; revised version: April 3, 2001     

Länger leben — Siechtum und Pflege ohne Grenzen?

At present, our society and its social security system are not prepared to cope with the challenges resulting from the continuous increase of life expectancy. The traditional concept of disease has to be modified for serving the special needs of the elderly. The optimistic compression of disease theory is an intriguing model, but lacks prove by available data. The anti-aging boom diverts the focus from the social and financial burden that will be unevitably caused by long-term care in the future. If there will not be an — up to now unforeseeable — breakthrough in research, particularly dementia will have an enormous impact on social cost which is often underestimated.     

Efficient Liability Rules: Complete Characterization

Received May, 18, 2000; revised version received March, 19, 2001     

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives in all sets of a given profile and the difference between the number of alternatives in the individual sets. We also show that, under additional axioms, we can combine these criteria only in a weighted procedure or in some lexicographic refinements of a weighted procedure.