Capital from an insurance company perspective

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 5, "International capital allocation at financial institutions." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a consensus between the public and private sectors on an agenda for capital regulation in the new century.Insurance industry ; Capital ; Risk

Human safety in the lunar environment

Any attempt to establish a continuously staffed base or permanent settlement on the Moon must safely meet the challenges posed by the Moon's surface environment. This environment is drastically different from the Earth's, and radiation and meteoroids are significant hazards to human safety. These dangers may be mitigated through the use of underground habitats, the piling up of lunar materials as shielding, and the use of teleoperated devices for surface operations. The lunar environment is detailed along with concepts for survival

Effects of Title IX and Sports Participation on Girls' Physical Ability and Weight

Summarizes findings from "Effects of Title IX and Sports Participation on Girls' Physical Ability and Weight," a study of how legislation to increase girls' participation in sports affected physical activity levels, body mass index, and body composition

Large circulant graphs of fixed diameter and arbitrary degree

We consider the degree-diameter problem for undirected and directed circulant graphs. To date, attempts to generate families of large circulant graphs of arbitrary degree for a given diameter have concentrated mainly on the diameter 2 case. We present a direct product construction yielding improved bounds for small diameters and introduce a new general technique for “stitching” together circulant graphs which enables us to improve the current best known asymptotic orders for every diameter. As an application, we use our constructions in the directed case to obtain upper bounds on the minimum size of a subset A of a cyclic group of order n such that the k-fold sumset kA is equal to the whole group. We also present a revised table of largest known circulant graphs of small degree and diameter

Distributing the Gains from Trade With Incomplete Information

We argue that the incomplete information which the government has about domestic agents means that tariffs become an optimal instrument to protect them from import competition. We solve for the optimal government policies. subject to the political constraint of ensuring Pareto gains from trade, the incentive compatibility constraint, and the government's budget constraint. We find that the optimal policies take the form of nonlinear tariffs, so that both buyers and sellers of the import face an effective price which exceeds its world level. We find that the tariffs are never complete, in the sense of bringing prices (or all individuals back to their initial level. Rather, it will always be possible to make some individuals strictly better off than at the initial prices, while ensuring that no persons are worse off.