The Ethics of Life Insurance Settlements: Investing in the Lives of Unrelated Individuals

Life insurance settlements, or life settlements, are life insurance policies owned by investor-beneficiaries on the lives of unrelated individuals. With life settlements, investors make substantial payments to the insured individuals upon purchasing such policies, pay any remaining premiums, and collect the death benefits upon the demise of the insured individuals. Transactions involving life settlements seem poised to become a major source of profits for investment banks, comparable in dollar amount to subprime mortgages. With life settlements, the insured individuals suffer no immediate harm, and the sale of a policy an individual owns is permissible under current law. Nevertheless, moral questions can be posed about the social values expressed by these practices, the effect of these practices on the virtue of charity, and the overall loss of social utility that will result from life settlements. We consider life settlements from utilitarian and libertarian perspectives, and then consider the effects of life settlements on social values and on individual character. On balance, we favor legislative changes in insurance and tax laws to discourage life settlements, and argue that certain forms of life settlements should be banned outright.     

On the existence of rational expectations equilibrium

We prove a theorem on the existence of rational expectations general economic equilibrium when agents condition on prices as well as on private information, and maximize the expectation of a state-dependent utility function. The key to the result is a new idealization of what it means for a set of empirical distributions to support agents' expectations. This idealization depends on the notion that agents compare their expectations with continuous versions of the random empirical distributions that are generated by the workings of the economy. The existence theorem covers all strictly concave utility functions, arbitrary distributions of the state variable, and situations in which the dimension of the state variable is large relative to the number of commodities.     

Opening services markets within Europe: Modelling foreign establishments in a CGE framework

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in services is often more important to supply foreign markets than cross-border trade. A complete analysis of services liberalization therefore requires the modelling of FDI. This paper presents the treatment of FDI in our CGE model WorldScan based on the ideas of Petri [Petri, P.A., 1997. Foreign direct investment in a computable general equilibrium framework. Paper Prepared for the Conference, Making APEC work: Economic Challenges and Policy Alternatives, March 13–14. Keio University, Tokyo] and Markusen [Markusen, J.R., 2002. Multinational Firms and The Theory of International Trade. MIT Press] that firms which establish affiliates abroad also transfer firm-specific knowledge. Consequently, capital owned by suppliers from home and foreign countries are not perfect substitutes. We apply this model to the proposals of the European Commission to open up services markets. Even when FDI in services could increase by 20% to 35%, the overall economic impact is limited. Our assessment suggests that GDP in the EU25 could increase up to 0.4%. These effects could be up to 0.8% higher if foreign capital also increases the overall productivity of the services sector.     

The ups and downs of European gender equality policy

In 2003, equal opportunities policy in the European Union suffered both ups and downs. New opportunities came in the guise of the hotly contested new directive on gender equality outside the field of employment, in the invitation to present the first of an annual report on equality between women and men to the Spring Council, in the consolidation of gender mainstreaming within the second round of the National Action Plans on social inclusion and in the new commitments to ‘substantial reductions by 2010’ in gender gaps in employment, unemployment and pay that were included in the new employment guidelines in 2003. These new guidelines presented, however, a major challenge to gender equality as the new phase of the European Employment Strategy dispensed with the four pillars, and therefore the equal opportunities pillar. Instead gender equality became just one of 10 new guidelines. In December the launch of the Employment Taskforce report appeared to push employment policy back more to a ‘full employment with flexibility’ approach and away from concerns with job quality. The focus was therefore more on the integration of women into employment rather than on closing the equality gap.     

Gender equality still on the European agenda—but for how long?

While the momentum has certainly not yet disappeared from the gender equality agenda within Europe, the impact of that agenda remains patchy. Progress within individual member states has been significant but not always steady or cumulative. At the European level more attention has been paid to the gender pay gap but policy initiatives remain weak. The loss of the equal opportunities pillar in the new employment guidelines puts this momentum at risk but the new phase still includes commitments to an integrated strategy of gender mainstreaming and equal opportunities.     

On the Contemporary Commodity Structure of World Trade Patterns: An Empirical Assessment

For about 150 years, international trade theory has mostly highlighted trade in consumption goods. Such a modeling approach was likely supported by the then prevailing commodity structure of world trade. This paper shows that – at least since 1970 – only about 20 per cent of commodity trade has taken place in consumables, the remainder being intermediates and capital goods. Theoretically, this evidence suggests a move in the modelling strategy for traded goods: from utility functions to production functions. Sanyal and Jones' "new trade theory" (1982) does precisely that. In addition, some crucial research challenges emerge. These relate to dynamic changes in some general characteristics of production technologies throughout the world.     

Direct and indirect effects of SEWi,family human capital and social capital on organizational social capital in small family firms

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Given the importance of social capital in organizations, this research answers the question of how socioemotional wealth importance (SEWi),...     

Viagra(ization) or Technoromanticism

Viagra can rather obviously be termed "techno-romantic"--literally it is a technology to make sex possible. But technoromanticism is also a philosophical term referring to the belief that advances in technology serve "truth" "unity" and "wholeness" according to Coyne (1999). Surprisingly many pharmaceutical companies seem to have developed "Viagra" or at least substances that were very similar, but to have ignored and/or rejected commercializing them. This article assumes that the primary activity of research and development in pharmaceutical companies is to produce texts that interpret chemicals as "meaningful." Assumptions of what constitutes (medical) meaning within prevailing technoromanticism have seen R and D as a form of "production" that demands rejection of "consumption." This technoromanticism succeeded in rebuffing the sexual "techno-romanticism" of Viagra in the company studied, but Viagra's enormous commercial success has reversed priorities. R and D's meaning system has proven to be no match for Viagra-ization--the article examines the resulting crisis in meaning systems.