Introduction Coastal floods account for a large proportion of the damage to life and property due to natural disasters world-wide. Out of the 15 greatest natural disasters in the world in terms of monetary losses between 2004 and 2008, 14 were coastal (Kron 2008). However, despite the enormity of a particular flood event, people often return to a flood-prone area after a disaster (Cigler 2007; ...

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a fi rst theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own child birth, and any adoption-specifi c monetary return that is received net of the costs of adopting th...

For economies in which the real rate of return on money is too low, the standard prescription is to deflate prices according to the Friedman rule. Implicit in this recommendation is the availability of a lump-sum tax instrument. In this paper, I view lump-sum tax obligations as a form of debt subject to default. While individuals may agree to honor such obligations ex ante, a lack of commitment...

In this paper, we investigate individuals’ investment in status in an environment where no monetary return can possibly be derived from reaching a better relative position. We use a real-effort experiment in which we permit individuals to learn and potentially improve their status (rank). We find that people express both intrinsic motivation and a taste for status. Indeed, people increase their...

We study economies where some assets play an essential role to …nance consumption opportunities but payment arrangements are subject to a moral hazard problem. Agents can produce fraudulent assets at a positive cost, which generates an endogenous upper bound on the quantity of assets that can be exchanged for goods and services. This endogenous liquidity constraint depends on the characteristic...

and real-return expectations in Canada and the United States via a twocountry extension of the equilibrium term-structure model introduced by Longstaff and Schwartz (1992). This paper is part of a larger research agenda that attempts to link empirically the structure of equilibrium termstructure models to macroeconomic fundamentals in both the United States and Canada. If they can accurately me...

The objective of this study is to determine the dynamics and contemporaneous interactions of Euro zone stock markets at the country and economic sector level. Overall test results have revealed the time-varying nature of the financial market integration process. Promoted by the anticipation and subsequently the formation of the currency union Euro zone stock markets became more integrated betwe...

Introduction A recent systematic review on the use of incentives to promote questionnaire return in clinical trials suggest they are effective [1], but not all studies have sufficient funds to use them. Promising an incentive once data are returned can reduce the cost burden of this approach, with possible further cost-savings if the offer were restricted to reminder letters only. This study ai...

Schummer [28] introduced the concept of bribeproof mechanism which, in a context where monetary transfer between agents is possible, requires that manipulations through bribes are ruled out. Unfortunately, in many domains, the only bribeproof mechanisms are the trivial ones which return a fixed outcome. This work presents one of the few constructions of non-trivial bribeproof mechanisms for thi...

Malingering is the intentional simulation of illness for an external gain.! It can occur in any medical illness and most clinicians will encounter this problem at some point in their clinical practice. Malingering occurs most often in a medicolegal setting where the external gain is monetary compensation for disability. However, in day-to-day practice most clinicians will probably be confronted...