Optimal Insurance Against Climatic Experience

An optimal insurance contract against a climatic risk is derived in the presence of an uninsurable and dependent aggregate production risk. The optimal design depends on the stochastic dependency between both sources of uncertainty and on the producer's attitude towards risk, especially on his prudent behavior. Rational weather insurance purchasing decisions are also derived. The prudent producer responds to actuarially fair weather insurance by increasing his exposure towards risk.     

Poverty Orderings

This paper reviews the literature of partial poverty orderings. Partial poverty orderings require unanimous poverty rankings for a class of poverty measures or a set of poverty lines. The need to consider multiple poverty measures and multiple poverty lines arises inevitably from the arbitrariness inherent in poverty comparisons. In the paper, we first survey the ordering conditions of various individual poverty measures for a range of poverty lines; for some measures necessary and sufficient conditions are identified while for others only some easily verifiable sufficient conditions are established. These ordering conditions are shown to have a close link with the stochastic dominance relations which are based on the comparisons of cumulative distribution functions. We then survey the ordering conditions for various classes of poverty measures with a single or a set of poverty lines; in all cases necessary and sufficient conditions are established. These conditions again rely on the stochastic dominance relations or their transformations. We also extend the relationship between poverty orderings and stochastic dominance to higher orders and explore the possibility and the conditions of increasing the power of poverty orderings beyond the second degree dominance condition.     

Fuzzy Pair-wise Dominance and Implications for Technical Efficiency Performance Assessment

Classically, the concept of efficiency measurement is based on the definition of a frontier that envelops the observed production plans. The efficiency score itself is based on the distance of an observed production plan from this frontier. The frontier along with the required technological assumptions (such as convexity) needed for its definition may be replaced with the concept of pair-wise dominance. This concept leads to a classification scheme for all production plans instead of a ranking based on efficiency scores. Also, the traditional assumption of deterministic or crisp production plans may be substituted with the weaker assumption of fuzzy production plans as proposed by fuzzy set theory. This paper merges these two concepts and defines a new classification scheme based on fuzzy dominance.     

How risky is a random process?

The riskiness of random processes is compared by (a) employing a decision theoretic equivalence between processes and lotteries on path-spaces to identify the riskiness of the former with that of the latter, and (b) using the theory of comparative riskiness of lotteries over vector spaces to compare the riskiness of lotteries on a given path-space. We derive the equivalence used in step (a) and contribute a new criterion to the theory applied in step (b). The validity of the new criterion, which applies second order stochastic dominance to utility distributions, is established by showing its equivalence to the benchmark decision theoretic criterion when comparing the riskiness of lotteries over any vector space. We demonstrate the theory’s tractability via diverse economic applications.     

Testing for infinite order stochastic dominance with applications to finance, risk and income inequality

In this paper we develop a test of infinite order degree stochastic dominance based on the use of the empirical Laplace transform function. Two applications are considered. One uses the income data of Anderson (Econometrica 64:1183–1193, 1996) and derives results consistent with his. In the other application we examine the dominance between the U.S. and U.K. stock markets. Using data on the S&P 500 and the FTALL-Share we show that the U.S. displays infinite order degree stochastic dominance of the U.K.

三阶随机占优准则在证券选择中的应用

通常可以用分布函数和分住数函数描述随机占优准则,Man-Chung Ng列举的两个例子说明在三阶随机占优条件下用两种方法得到的结论是不一致的,这与Levy的观点相反。该文分别将这两种方法描述的三阶随机占优准则用于上海证券市场的基金选择,发现用两种方法在应用中得到的结论并不总是一致的。由此验证用Levy提出的分位数方法描述的随机占优准则进行实证研究是不正确的,一阶和二阶条件除外。     

Did financial deregulation help consumers? Access to market-yield instruments

The maturity effect (ME) of futures prices postulated by Samuelson (1965) is re-examined using three nonparametric tests. The consistent entropy asymmetry test by Racine and Maasoumi (2007) indicates that variance is an appropriate risk or uncertainty measure for ME, and value-at-risk and expected shortfall are also adopted. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov dominance test and Wilcoxon rank sum and signed rank test are employed to rank the estimates of the three risk measures under a moving-window framework. The testing outcomes are contingent on futures type, testing method and risk measures. The testing outcomes show mild support for ME.     

Globalization with a human face

This paper has six parts. The first part defines globalization. The second discusses globalization eras. The third discusses the irreversibility and inevitability of globalization. The fourth section discusses the benefits and costs of globalization. The fifth section asks what is to be done. The sixth section contains my conclusions.     

开放中的经济增长与政策选择--当前经济增长态势分析

对外开放与高资本积累共同推动了中国经济增长 ,其中政府的主导作用非常鲜明。文章首先指出 :1)尽管现在贸易摩擦频繁 ,但中国的贸易增长仍有空间 ;2 )虽然现实的储蓄缺口已经消失 ,但考虑到大量农村劳动力需要转移 ,资本形成缺口依然很大 ,仍有引进外资的必要。文章接着分析 :由于中国在对外开放与资本形成机制上存在着政府干预形成的严重扭曲 ,从而在增长过程中不断累积着“结构扭曲”的风险。面临金融开放 ,这种扭曲的结构会变得更加脆弱。因此 ,如何充分利用外部资源加快中国的非农化进程 ,同时消除制度性扭曲 ,优化资源配置方式 ,减少外部冲击风险 ,促进经济增长成为本文探讨的主线。