This paper analyzes the dynamic interactions between the precision of information, technological development, and welfare within an overlapping generations model. More precise information about idiosyncratic production shocks has ambiguous effects on technological progress and welfare, which depend critically on the risk sharing capacity of the economy’s financial system. For example, we show t...

This article tests the hypothesis that the exposure to the threat to societies posed by the introduction of new technologies is associated with a normalization of risk perception. Data collected in 2000 by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on environmental issues were used to explore this hypothesis. Representative samples from 25 countries were employed to assess the national le...

Technological innovations often formulate new market regimes and create incentives to abandon existing, less attractive ones. However, this decision depends not only on forces, such as economic technological uncertainty, but also attitudes toward risk. Although greater risk aversion typically raises the incentive postpone investment, impact of becomes more complex when a firm has discretion ove...

Economic development of transition and developed countries is associated with increasingly unhealthy dietary habits among low-income population segments. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s sociological theory of risk society, the present research note calls attention to the positive relation between national economic development and food risks that result in the rise of food-related diseases and healthca...

The innovation process has intensified as a result of the application of new digital technologies. These technologies that simulate, model and integrate, intensify the innovation process through facilitating economy of effort and definiteness of aim. Of all the many analytical lenses used to examine innovation, the most valuable in accounting for this " automation of innovation " is Rothwell's ...

A general model is proposed for studying ranking problems. We investigate learning methods based on empirical minimization of the natural estimates of the ranking risk. The empirical estimates are of the form of a U -statistic. Inequalities from the theory of U -statistics and U processes are used to obtain performance bounds for the empirical risk minimizers. Convex risk minimization methods a...

Using a new dataset of currency option prices, we study the evolution of investor confidence in 1992-1998 over the chance of individual currencies to converge to the Euro. Convergence risk, which may reflect uncertainty over policy commitment as well as exogenous fundamentals, induces a level of implied volatility in excess of actual volatility (volatility wedge). We show formally that confiden...