Established in 1984, the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center develops and promotes effective corporate and public policies for low‐probability events with potentially catastrophic consequences through the integration of risk assessment, and risk perception with risk management strategies. Natural disasters, technological hazards, and national and international security issues ...

Vol. XLIX (February 2012), 15 –25 *Ravi Dhar is the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing, Yale School of Management, and Professor of Psychology, Yale University (e-mail: [email protected]). Klaus Wertenbroch is Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Europe Campus, Fontainebleau, France, and is currently Judith C. and William G. Bollinger Visiting Professor and Visiting Professo...

We propose that higher skilled firms diversify in equilibrium even though managers exploit idiosyncratic performance shocks to time diversification moves. We formalize this intuition in a mistakefree equilibrium and test our predictions using a large panel dataset on the hedge fund industry 19772006. The results show that returns fall following new fund launches, but are 13 basis points per mon...

We trace the evolution of extreme illiquidity discounts among Treasury securities during the financial crisis, when bonds fell more than six percent below more-liquid but otherwise identical notes. Using high-resolution data on market quality and trader identities and characteristics, we find that the discounts amplify through feedback loops, where cheaper, less-liquid securities flow to invest...

We study how hedging a ects rm value and real investment activity. We obtain exogenous variation in access to e ective hedging instruments from the unexpected breakdown in the correlation of Canadian oil prices with the benchmark oil price used in NYMEX hedging contracts. Using a di erence-in-di erences framework we compare Canadian oil producers to their U.S. counterparts, who maintain access ...

Children with kwashiorkor almost invariably have diarrhoea which may be severe and prolonged. The exact cause is often obscure and the management unsatisfactory (Brock et al., 1955; Trowell, 1958; Pretorius and Smit, 1958). Recently Bowie, Brinkman, and Hansen (1965), and Bowie, Barbezat, and Hansen (1967) found that the majority of their kwashiorkor patients with severe diarrhoea responded wit...

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive link between average levels of subjective well-being and GDP per capita across countries, and find no ...

We propose a tractable general equilibrium framework to analyze the effectiveness of bank capital regulations when banks face competition from public markets. Our analysis shows that increased competition can not only render previously optimal bank capital regulations ineffective but also imply that, over some ranges, increases in capital requirements cause more banks to engage in value-destroy...

Professor Lancaster’s audacious prediction of a paperless society by the end of the twentieth century is examined from multiple perspectives. Rationales for the prognostication, textual and contextual; reception by the profession; and impact on the literature of library and information science are reviewed. Bibliometric data is introduced in support of the extensive citation links to Lancaster’...