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...

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...

As nuclear families have become increasingly less stable over the past quarter century, married couples have been faced with the difficult task of negotiating the terms by which marriage is ended. For parents, divorce involves questions revolving around the care and sustenance of children. In this paper we investigate whether observed divorce settlements indicate that parents make trade-offs in...

THE 1959 Mental Health Act emphasises the need to integrate psychiatric patients with the community at large rather than to isolate them from it, as hitherto. This identification with the normal community has been the Ministry of Labour's approach to the employment of disabled people since the time of the Disabled Persons (Employment) <4ct of 1944. For the past 17 years all disabled people, whe...

Increasing settlement and post-settlement survival during the critical transition from planktonic larvae to benthic juveniles will increase efficiency for sea urchin aquaculture. This study investigated the effects of temperature and settlement cues on the settlement and post-settlement survival of the sea urchin Tripneustes gratilla during this phase. The current commercial methodology, which ...

Recovery of degraded reefs is dependent on the settlement of coral larvae into habitats typically dominated by benthic algae, so that benthic algae may play pivotal roles in coral settlement and reef recovery. Here we demonstrate that waterborne influences of macroalgae could affect coral settlement before larvae contact reef substrata and that such effects vary between macroalgae. We tested fo...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Crepidula fornicata Habitat association Larval settlement Microhabitat Post-settlement mortality Recruitment Habitat-specific distributions of marine benthic invertebrates can be caused by several processes acting prior to, during or after settlement, including differential settlement and varying levels of mortality between habitat types following adaptation of t...

This paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale in depository and settlement systems. Evidence from 16 settlement institutions across different regions for the years 1993–2000 indicates the existence of significant economies of scale. The degree of such economies, however, differs by size of settlement institution and region. While smaller settlement service providers rev...

Coral settlement is a key ecological process in the maintenance, recovery and resilience of coral reef ecosystems. Coral reefs in the Persian Gulf survive in one of the world’s most extreme environments, yet there remains limited knowledge of the role of coral settlement considered critical for maintaining population dynamics. Spatial and temporal patterns of coral settlement were examined at 6...

For sessile marine invertebrates, processes contributing to larval release, dispersal, and settlement in favourable habitats are central to patterns of distribution and community structure. We quantified larval release patterns, phototactic behaviour, and settlement in response to environmental cues for the coral reef sponge Luffariella variabilis. Individual sponges released up to 830 larvae d...