Microfinance programs are recognized as a way of improving incomes and creating employment for large numbers of low-income families, but there are concerns that working conditions within these informal microenterprises are far from ideal. For example, when families receive loans to expand a microenterprise, children may make up the labor shortfall until the family can afford to hire adult worke...

Fire disasters in informal settlements (also referred to as slums, shantytowns, favelas, etc.) are a major challenge worldwide, with single incident being able displace thousands of people. Numerous factors including dwelling spacing, material type, topography, weather, fuel loads, roads, and more influence fire spread. Conducting large-scale experiments quantify understand these phenomena is d...

Structured settlement underwriting is the underwriting of medically impaired lives for the purchase of an annuity to fund the settlement. Other than risk assessment, structured settlement (SS) underwriting has little in common with traditional life insurance underwriting. Most noteworthy of these differences is the relative lack of actuarial data on which to base decisions about mortality and t...

I spoke in June in Canberra to a joint luncheon meeting of the AIBF and two other local organisations. My theme was the many faces of risk in banking. Today I would like to expand on a couple of the risks I touched on then, namely: • the Year 2000 problem; and • payments system risk, particularly in relation to settlement of foreign exchange transactions. This also gives me the opportunity to t...

Given the very clear and limited role that states created for judicial settlement in the United Nations Charter, a serious attempt to expand the International Court of Justice’s jurisdiction would inevitably involve an amendment of the Charter itself. In light of the hostility that all but a few states have shown with regard to compulsory adjudication, such an effort would be doomed to failure....

Previous comparative analyses of gross and net settlement have focused on the credit risk of the central counterparty in net settlement arrangements, and on the incentives for participants to alter the risk of the portfolio under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates the demand for payment services, we are able to show some largely unexplored advantages of net settlemen...