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Now showing items 21-30 of 31
The Catastrophic Effects of Natural Disasters on Insurance Markets
(Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 2006)
Natural catastrophes often have catastrophic risks on insurance companies as well as on the insured. Using a very large dataset on homeowners' insurance coverage by state, by firm, and by year for the 1984 to 2004 period, ...
Punitive Damages: How Jurors Fail to Promote Efficiency
(Harvard Journal on Legislation, 2002)
Evidence of corporate risk-cost balancing often leads to inefficient punitive damages awards, suggesting that jurors fail to base their decision making on principles of economic efficiency. In this Article, Professor Viscusi ...
The Value of Life in Legal Contexts: Survey and Critique
(American Law and Economics Review, 2000)
The Changing Landscape of Blockbuster Punitive Damages Awards
(American Law and Economics Review, 2009)
This article investigates the determinants of the blockbuster punitive damages awards of at least $100 million. As of the end of 2008, there had been 100 such awards with an average value of $3.0 billion. The U.S. Supreme ...
Tort Liability Litigation Costs for Commercial Claims
(American Law and Economics Review, 2007)
This article analyzes tort liability litigation costs using the Texas Department of Insurance Commercial Liability Insurance Closed Claim database for the years 1988–2004. Insurer costs to defend claims in which a suit was ...
Estimating Discount Rates for Environmental Quality from Utility-Based Choice Experiments
(Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 2008)
We estimate rates of time preference using a utility-based choice experiment
administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,914 respondents. For the full
sample, the rate of time preference is very high for ...
Adjusting the Value of a Statistical Life for Age and Cohort Effects
(The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008)
To resolve the theoretical ambiguity in the effect of age on the value of statistical life (VSL), this article uses a novel, age-dependent fatal risk measure to estimate age-specific hedonic wage regressions. VSL exhibits ...
The Denominator Blindness Effect: Accident Frequencies and the Misjudgment of Recklessness
(American Law and Economics Review, 2004)
People seriously misjudge accident risks because they routinely neglect relevant information about exposure. Such risk judgments affect both personal and public policy decisions, e.g., choice of a transport mode, but also ...
An Empirical Assessment of Early Offer Reform for Medical Malpractice
(Journal of Legal Studies, 2007)
The early offer reform proposal for medical malpractice provides an option for claimants to receive prompt payment of all their net economic losses and reasonable attorney fees. Using a large sample of closed individual ...
Risk Equity
(The Journal of Legal Studies, 2000)
Risk equity serves as the purported rationale for a wide range of inefficient policy practices, such as the concern that hypothetical individual risks not be too great. This paper proposes an alternative risk equity concept ...