Catastrophe risks: the case of seisms

Catastrophes and risks have had a great influence on the evolution of human development. We analyze behaviors in front of risks, then we consider some basic principles that have guided private and public behaviors. Managing risks has become a specialty for finance and insurance, but they are not the only institutions that allow to confront them. We conclude on an example of how public funds, private insurance and reinsurance companies can work together and use financial markets in order to cover financial risks due to seisms.

Measurement in Economics and Social Science

The paper discusses measurement, primarily in economics, from both analytical and historical perspectives. The historical section traces the commitment to ordinalism on the part of economic theorists from the doctrinal disputes between classical economics and marginalism, through the struggle of orthodox economics against socialism down to the cold-war alliance between mathematical social science and anti-communist ideology. In economics the commitment to ordinalism led to the separation of theory from the quantitative measures that are computed in practice: price and quantity indexes, consumer surplus and real national product. The commitment to ordinality entered political science, via Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’, effectively merging it with economics, and ensuring its sterility. How can a field that has as its central result the impossibility of democracy contribute to the design of democratic institutions? The analytical part of the paper deals with the quantitative measures mentioned above. I begin with the conceptual clarification that what these measures try to achieve is a restoration of the money metric that is lost when prices are variable. I conclude that there is only one measure that can be embedded in a satisfactory economic theory, free from unreasonable restrictions. It is the Törnqvist index as an approximation to its theoretical counterpart the Divisia index. The statistical agencies have at various times produced different measures for real national product and its components, as well as related concepts. I argue that all of these are flawed and that a single deflator should be used for the aggregate and the components. Ideally this should be a chained Törnqvist price index defined on aggregate consumption. The social sciences are split. The economic approach is abstract, focused on the assumption of rational and informed behavior, and tends to the political right. The sociological approach is empirical, stresses the non-rational aspects of human behavior and tends to the political left. I argue that the split is due to the fact that the empirical and theoretical traditions were never joined in the social sciences as they were in the natural sciences. I also argue that measurement can potentially help in healing this split

Towards a Puviani’s Fiscal Illusion Index

This paper presents an index of Fiscal Illusion for 68 democratic countries from 1960 to 2006. The theory of Fiscal Illusion studied relates to a wrong perception of government budget aggregates from the voters’ and taxpayers’ perspectives. In the construction of the index, methodological issues were carefully taken into account. The results obtained reveal that Fiscal Illusion varies greatly around the world. Countries such as Mali, Pakistan, Russia, and Sri Lanka have the highest average values over the time period considered, while Austria, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and New Zealand have the lowest. Regarding the time dimension, between 1980 and 1995 there was a significant decrease in the average value of the index across countries, suggesting a reduction in the adoption of Fiscal Illusion practices during this period. After 1995, the index remained stable in most countries.Fiscal Illusion; Indexes/Indicators; Democracy.

Measurement in Economics and Social Science

The paper discusses measurement, primarily in economics, from both analytical and historical perspectives. The historical section traces the commitment to ordinalism on the part of economic theorists from the doctrinal disputes between classical economics and marginalism, through the struggle of orthodox economics against socialism down to the cold-war alliance between mathematical social science and anti-communist ideology. In economics the commitment to ordinalism led to the separation of theory from the quantitative measures that are computed in practice: price and quantity indexes, consumer surplus and real national product. The commitment to ordinality entered political science, via Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’, effectively merging it with economics, and ensuring its sterility. How can a field that has as its central result the impossibility of democracy contribute to the design of democratic institutions? The analytical part of the paper deals with the quantitative measures mentioned above. I begin with the conceptual clarification that what these measures try to achieve is a restoration of the money metric that is lost when prices are variable. I conclude that there is only one measure that can be embedded in a satisfactory economic theory, free from unreasonable restrictions. It is the Törnqvist index as an approximation to its theoretical counterpart the Divisia index. The statistical agencies have at various times produced different measures for real national product and its components, as well as related concepts. I argue that all of these are flawed and that a single deflator should be used for the aggregate and the components. Ideally this should be a chained Törnqvist price index defined on aggregate consumption. The social sciences are split. The economic approach is abstract, focused on the assumption of rational and informed behavior, and tends to the political right. The sociological approach is empirical, stresses the non-rational aspects of human behavior and tends to the political left. I argue that the split is due to the fact that the empirical and theoretical traditions were never joined in the social sciences as they were in the natural sciences. I also argue that measurement can potentially help in healing this split.collective choice; consumer surplus; money metric; price and quantity indexes; welfare measurement

Toward Entity-Aware Search

As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability

Tax Structures and FDI The Deterrent Effects of Complexity and Uncertainty

In this study we examine the connection between the varied experiences of the transition countries in attracting FDI and their diverse experiences in transforming their tax structures to be consistent with a market economy. In particular, we study whether complexity and uncertainty in their tax laws have deterred foreign direct investment by increasing transaction costs, the compliance burden and the unpredictability of tax liabilities. Our results indicate that complexity and uncertainty, in the sense of multiple tax rates, indeterminate language in the tax law, and inconsistent changes in the tax laws have a significant negative effect on inward foreign direct investment.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39943/2/wp558.pd

The Changing Economic Circumstances of the Older Population: A Cohort Analysis

The paper provides an analysis of the economic circumstances of Canadian cohorts in older phases of the life cycle. It begins by discussing the definition of "old" and the case for an upward revision of the traditional age-65 definition. It then goes on to consider changes in patterns of labour force participation of older age groups, their income levels and distribution, the importance of government transfer payments, consumption levels and patterns of saving, the extent of home ownership and mortgage status, and the effects of inflation.older population; cohort; income; consumption; saving