When, not if: the inescapability of an uncertain climate future

Climate. To hedge or not against an uncertain climate future?

I t has been over a decade since Nordhaus (1) published his seminal paper on mitigation policy for climate change. His question was “To slow or not to slow?”; his answer was derived from a traditional costbenefit approach. He found that a tax levied on fossil fuel in proportion to its carbon content, which would climb over time at roughly the rate of interest, maximized global welfare. Although...

The uncertain future of climate uncertainty

Strong scientific consensus prevails over the fact that Earth’s climate is currently warming and will be warming further over the coming decades, as a consequence of the radiative perturbation caused by anthropogenic greenhousegas (GHG) emissions. The conclusions of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4: Solomon et al. [2007], [AR4] hereafter) further buttress this consensus. There is, howev...

"If not us, who? If not now, when?".

Annuitization : If Not Now , When ?

In previous writing – and related papers by Chen and Milevsky (JFP, 2003) or Ameriks, Veres and Warshawsky (JFP, 2001) – the point has been made that payout annuities, either variable or fixed, have a rightful place in the optimal life-cycle portfolio. I have argued that depending on a lifecycle investor’s bequest motive versus their desire for consumption, they should have a substantial portio...

The EHCR – if not now , when ?

The promotion and uptake of Electronic Healthcare Record (EHCR) systems has been much slower than originally envisaged due to a number of factors. These include, the widespread under-investment in clinical computing, fragmented markets with attendant low profitability exacerbated by a lack of proven standards together with the need to protect investment in existing (legacy) IT systems. Furtherm...