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     

日本金融业的"双重杠杆"现象剖析

一、令人关注的“双重杠杆”现象“双重杠杆”(Double-Gearing)也有人称之为双向杠杆,是指日本银行拥有大量的保险公司证券(通常以次级贷款和盈余票据形式持有),人寿保险公司也拥有大量的银行次级债券和股票,银行和保险公司互相持有彼此发行的证券的现象。在日本,保险公司是银行的大股东,持有每一家城市银行超过10%的股份,银行和保险公司互相交叉持股,依靠彼此信用筹集资金。截至2000年3月,保险公司提供给银行6.7万亿日元次级债券和7.7万亿日元股票,银行提供给保险公司2.3万亿日元盈余票据和次级债券。2000年,由于Chiyoda人寿保险公司、Ky…     

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.