This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of financial assistance to farms on crop biodiversity in an uncertain setting. The findings reveal that risk aversion is an important driving force for crop biodiversity conservation. Riskaverse farmers can hedge against the uncertainty they face by allocating land to different crop species. However, policies intended to sta...

We show that the production of information in financial markets is limited by the extent of risk sharing. The wider a stock’s investor base, the smaller the risk borne by each shareholder and the less valuable information. A firm which expands its investor base without raising capital affects its information environment through three channels: (i) it induces incumbent shareholders to reduce the...

This chapter considers the natural hazard Risk Manager as an agent for choosing between interventions that affect the impact of future hazards. As such, it is possible to proceed broadly quantitatively, and to set aside the many less-quantifiable concerns that arise during a period of real-time hazard management. Thus the aim is to describe a framework in which it is possible to address questio...

It is well-known that pension fund participants can benefit from intergenerational risksharing, but that different generations have different incentives. This paper models intergenerational solidarity in closing funded pension plans as a bargaining process between generations. We consider generations which each are represented by members of the pension fund’s board. We model pension funds that ...

CORAS is a research and technological development project under the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme (Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-General Information Society). One of the main objectives of CORAS is to develop a practical framework, exploiting methods for risk analysis, semiformal methods for object-oriented modelling, and computerised tools, for a precis...

We use a model of optimal portfolio choice to measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages. There is substantial heterogeneity in risk preferences, positively correlated in most villages with alternative estimates based on a full risk-sharing model.