La Crema: A Case Study of Mutual Fire Insurance

We analyze a mutual fire insurance mechanism used in Andorra, which is called La Crema in the local language. This mechanism relies on households' announced property values to determine how much a household is reimbursed in the case of a fire and how payments are apportioned among other households. The only Pareto-efficient al- location reachable through the mechanism requires that all house- holds honestly report the true value of their property. However, such honest reporting is not an equilibrium except in the extreme case in which the property values are identical for all households. Neverthe- less, as the size of the society becomes large, the benefits from devi- ating from truthful reporting vanish, and all the nondegenerate equilibria of the mechanism are nearly truthful and approximately Pareto efficient.Publicad

La Crema: A case study of mutual fire insurance

We analyze a mutual fire insurance mechanism used in Andorra, which is called La Crema in the local language. This mechanism relies on households' announced property values to determine how much a household is reimbursed in the case of a fire and how payments are apportioned among other households. The only Pareto eficient allocation reachable through the mechanism requires that all households honestly report the true value of their property. However, such honest reporting is not an equilibrium except in the extreme case where the property values are identical for all households. Nevertheless, as the size of the society becomes large, the benefits from deviating from truthful reporting vanish, and all of the non-degenerate equilibria of the mechanism are nearly truthful and approximately Pareto efficient.Insurance, contract theory, mechanism design, truthful revelation

Ecofeminism, Commons, and Climate Justice

Much recent work in ecological economics, degrowth, climate justice, and political ecology focuses on ‘commons’ as an emergent paradigm for sustainable governance institutions to address or rectify ecological crisis. This paper summarizes definitions and typologies of commons, give some examples of commons which help to further climate justice, and discusses these ideas from an ecofeminist perspective.his research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-008

Conglomeration Versus Strategic Focus: Evidence from the Insurance Industry

We provide evidence on the validity of the conglomeration hypothesis versus the strategic focus hypothesis for financial institutions using data on U.S. insurance companies. We distinguish between the hypotheses using profit scope economies, which measures the relative efficiency of joint versus specialized production, taking both costs and revenues into account. The results suggest that the conglomeration hypothesis dominates for some types of financial service providers and the strategic focus hypothesis dominates for other types. This may explain the empirical puzzle of why joint producers and specialists both appear to be competitively viable in the long run.

Evaluating the demand for aquaculture insurance: An investigation of fish farmers' willingness to pay in central coastal areas in China

Despite the remarkable development in its fishery sector, the penetration rate of fishery insurance in China is considerably low. This paper examines the key factors that contribute to the poor performance of fishery insurance, in particular aquaculture insurance, in China. The double-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation method (DB DCCVM) is used to investigate fish farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for an insurance program, based on a survey of 1280 fish farmers in three coastal cities in China. The results indicate that fish farmers’ decisions on adoption of an insurance scheme depend on various factors, among which magnitude of loss, fish farmers’ awareness toward insurance and their education all have a positive impact. However, income and farming years are more likely to have a negative effect. In addition, the mean WTP for aquaculture insurance is estimated to be CNY 579 (US$ 90.05) 2 per household, which is equivalent to 1.5% of fish farmers' mean annual income. These results provide several policy implications for not only the Chinese government but also researchers as well as insurance companies

Audit report on the City of Exira, Iowa for the year ended June 30, 2007

Audit report on the City of Exira, Iowa for the year ended June 30, 200

Compensating for Natural Resource Damage Caused by Vessel-Induced Marine Oil Pollution: Comparing the International, U.S., and Chinese Regimes

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Building Commons Governance for a Greener Economy

Much recent work in ecological economics and political ecology, including calls for “de-growth” in the transition towards more sustainable economies, focuses on commons as a promising paradigm for sustainable governance institutions.  The vision involves people who depend on or have an interest in a resource or asset, working together co-operatively to use that asset for production, service provision, and exchange which creates value and well-being while integrating ecological care, justice, and long-term planning to the best of diverse communities’ abilities. This includes institutions such as co-ops, land trusts, and non-market or beyond-market collective ways of organizing production, distribution, consumption, and waste or materials management.Developing such collective institutions requires nurturing the skills and abilities needed to create and maintain them: empathy, communication and listening skills, a sense of shared purpose, creativity, dispute resolution across differences, long-term vision, environmental awareness and stewardship, among others. Transformative education praxis and transdisciplinarity facilitate the growth of these skills and abilities in children and adults, as Paulo Freire and other transformative learning practitioners have shown (Gadotti 2009; O’Sullivan 1999;Gutierrez & Prado 1998). Transformative pedagogy, including both eco-pedagogy and transdisciplinarity, is foundational as human society evolves institutions for sustainability such as commons.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Mandating Environmental Liability Insurance

Plant cuticles are extracellular membranes covering aerial organs of plants, whose main functions rely on the protection against water loss, mechanical injury from the environment, attack of microorganism, and also regulation of gas exchange. Among the several constituents of plant cuticles, waxes are those that play an important role in their barrier properties. In order to enhance the mechanical properties of wax, NFC was applied in. In the project, mainly two kinds of methods were used to prepare wax-NFC composites. One way was wax and NFC were dissolved in toluene and casted to be a film, another way was to prepare NFC aerogel firstly, and then, impregnated the aerogel into wax liquid. After pressing it the structure was more compact. In order to characterize the properties of samples, SEM, XRD, TGA, DSC, Contact angle testing, tensile test and oxygen permeability methods were applied in