Declining CO₂ price paths

Risk and uncertainty are important in pricing climate damages. Despite a burgeoning literature, attempts to marry insights from asset pricing with climate economics have largely failed to supplement—let alone supplant—decades-old climate–economy models, largely due to their analytic and computational complexity. Here, we introduce a simple, modular framework that identifies core trade-offs, highlights the sensitivity of results to key inputs, and helps pinpoint areas for further work

Optimal dynamic portfolio selection with earnings-at-risk

In this paper we investigate a continuous-time portfolio selection problem. Instead of using the classical variance as usual, we use earnings-at-risk (EaR) of terminal wealth as a measure of risk. In the settings of Black-Scholes type financial markets and constantly-rebalanced portfolio (CRP) investment strategies, we obtain closed-form expressions for the best CRP investment strategy and the efficient frontier of the mean-EaR problem, and compare our mean-EaR analysis to the classical mean-variance analysis and to the mean-CaR (capital-at-risk) analysis. We also examine some economic implications arising from using the mean-EaR model. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.postprin

Treatment of rising damp in historical buildings: wall base ventilation

Intervention in older buildings increasingly requires extensive and objective knowledge of what one will be working with. The multifaceted aspect of work carried out on buildings tends to encompass a growing number of specialities, with marked emphasis on learning the causes of many of the problems that affect these buildings and the possible treatments that can solve them. Moisture transfer in walls of old buildings, which are in direct contact with the ground, leads to a migration of soluble salts responsible for many building pathologies.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V23-4H7T0H7-1/1/f5e8a4ec173c5dadf120770678facf4

Financial diversification strategies before World War I: Buy-and-hold versus naïve portfolio selection

This study contributes to a growing volume of scholarship that highlights the importance of financial diversification in business history. It shows that, pre-WWI, financial advice for equal portfolio weighting, the so-called naïve diversification, then called scientific investment or geographical distribution of risk, was a sophisticated strategy for Victorian investors and not suboptimal to Markowitz optimization. Drawing upon a unique dataset of 507 individual portfolios at death, this study shows that, although Victorian investors, in particular wealthy investors, did diversify investment risk across a number of securities, they did not hold equally weighted portfolios. It explores possible reasons for the unbalanced nature of investor portfolios and dismisses socio economic factors, illiquidity, passive ‘buy the market’ and market timing strategies as possible explanatory factors. The results rather point to a strategy of naïve diversification spread over time, a ‘buy as you go and hold strategy’, buying new securities as savings allowed and holding them until death