In light of the growing threat of climate change and urgency of mitigation at the societal and individual level, an exponentially growing body of research has addressed how and what people think about climate change—ranging from basic judgments of truth and attitudes about risk to predictions of future outcomes. However, the field is also beset by a striking variety of items and scales used to measure climate change beliefs, with notable differences in content, untested structural assumptions, and unsatisfactory or unknown psychometric properties. In a series of four studies (total N = 2,678), scales for the assessment of climate change beliefs are developed that are comprehensive and balanced in content and psychometrically sound. The latent construct structure is tested, and evidence of high rank-order stability (1-year retest-reliability) and predictive validity (for policy preferences and actual behavior) provided.

The literature on emotion and risk-taking is large and heterogeneous. Whereas some studies have found that positive emotions increase risk-taking and negative emotions increase risk aversion, others have found just the opposite. In this study, we investigated this question in the context of a risky decision-making task with embedded high-resolution sampling of participants’ subjective emotional valence. Across two large-scale experiments (N = 329 and 524), we consistently found evidence for a negative association between self-reported emotional valence and risk-taking behaviors. That is, more negative subjective affect was associated with increased risk-seeking, and more positive subjective affect was associated with increased risk aversion. This effect was evident both when we compared participants with different levels of mean emotional valence as well as when we considered within-participant emotional fluctuations over the course of the task. Prospect-theoretic computational modeling analyses suggested that both between- and within-participant effects were driven by an effect of emotional valence on the curvature of the subjective utility function (i.e., increased risk tolerance in more negative emotional states), as well as by an effect of within-person emotion fluctuations on loss aversion. We interpret findings in terms of a tendency for participants in negative emotional states to choose high-risk, high-reward options in an attempt to improve their emotional state.

We analyze the effect of green patents on G7 stock market returns. First, we build a small IS-LM model to identify the relevant channels, augmented with open-economy channels and the Green Tobin’s q (Faria et al., 2022). The model highlights that the intertemporal impacts of greening on stock returns are ambiguous. We then turn to an estimated global vector autoregressive model to more rigorously analyze the effect of monetary and green patenting shocks across the G7. Both shocks influence green patents through real and financial markets. As regards green patent shocks, results suggest that a tension exists over time between promoting pollution reduction and energy efficiency and the profitability of (green and brown) companies in the aggregate. We perform a variety of robustness exercises around our main results. Our results provide something of a challenge to the literature and call for more research effort to understand the various channels that might explain this dynamic—and in turn whether any particular policy recommendations follow.

Our study aims to contribute to the existing body of research on age-related changes in decision-making by investigating susceptibility to the attraction effect across adulthood. Prior studies have produced inconsistent conclusions regarding the decision-making abilities of older individuals, with some portraying them as easily manipulated and risk-averse, while others suggest the opposite. To address this issue, we conducted two experiments using a novel paradigm of the roulette task: (1) in an online environment with 357 participants and (2) in a laboratory setting with 173 participants. The results were consistent and demonstrated the robustness of the attraction effect. However, no age differences in susceptibility to the attraction effect as a common decision bias were found. As predicted, older adults were more likely to commit simple decision-making mistakes, especially in the preliminary trials, which could have serious financial or societal consequences. Additionally, older adults exhibited more risk-seeking behaviours. Furthermore, we observed that the dynamics of decision competence (as indicated by a decrease in the selection of erroneous decoy options and an increase in decision fluency) were similar for both younger and older adults, suggesting preservation of the ability to optimise decision-making while becoming familiar with new tasks. These findings provide insight into the cognitive functioning of older adults and indicate that decision-making abilities in late adulthood may be more complex than commonly assumed.

Although Lippmann's The Good Society was written to address the crisis in liberal democracies in the 1930s, we argue that it offers a novel and plausible institutionalist account of the productivity slowdown and the increase in the experience of insecurity that has characterised most liberal democracies over the last 20–40 years. Central to Lippmann's account is a Smithian-institutionalist model of growth where property rights have to evolve both to encourage continued levels of risk taking in the face of new uncertainties and also to offset new sources of unequal bargaining power that the very process of growth itself creates. When property rights fossilise and fail to evolve, as in the 1930s and plausibly also now, productivity growth slows down, insecurity rises, and illiberal political creeds prosper. To avoid this, Lippmann's analysis suggests that property rights have to change to re-energise risk taking and to offset the new sources of unequal bargaining power. For example, in current circumstances, new ‘positive’ property rights arising from the development of social insurance might encourage risk taking and new ‘negative’ property rights in personal data might help offset the new sources of unequal bargaining power that have emerged.

This article investigates the promise of Insurtech to expand the frontier of the insurance market to include vulnerable populations around the world. It contributes to current debates on the proliferation of new technologies for financial inclusion as embedded in contemporary forms of platform-based capitalism. We argue that Insurtech’s promises fall short of expectations because of the contradiction between the principles of platform scalability and insurance risk pooling. Such contradictions lead Insurtech platforms to unpool risk rather than provide innovative technologies to pool it. This ultimately limits the expansion of markets for inclusive insurance as Insurtech platforms struggle to scale up the market through their supposedly disruptive technology. Our analysis draws on a range of regulatory reports, complemented by in-depth interviews with Insurtech executive officers. The article offers insights into the contradictory principles currently driving the digital inclusive insurance market, as well as the limits to the ongoing global expansion of platform capitalism.

In previous research, several computational methods have been proposed to analyse the navigation, transportation safety and collision risks of maritime vessels. The objective of this study is to use Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to assess the collision risk between two vessels before an actual collision occurs. We introduce the concept of an angle interval in the model to enable real-time response to vessel collision risks. When predicting collision risks, we consider factors such as relative distance, relative velocity and phase between the vessels. Lastly, the collision risk is divided into different regions and represented by different colours. The green region represents a low-risk area, the yellow region serves as a cautionary zone and the red region indicates a high-alert zone. If a signal enters the red region, the vessel's control system will automatically intervene and initiate evasive manoeuvres. This reactive mechanism enhances the safety of vessel operations, ensuring the implementation of effective collision avoidance measures.

Turn-of-the-century America witnessed many forgotten risk-making experiments that probed the limits of insurability by stepping beyond the familiar fields of life, fire, and marine insurance. One attempted to underwrite firms’ lost profits during strikes.

The ensuing debates on strike insurance’s practicability revealed scientistic expectations of never-ending actuarial progress that united an otherwise-divided business community. Yet attempting to realize strike insurance quickly meant grappling with the limits of insurability. Labor strife’s fuzzy causality involving human agency forestalled the homogenous classification that underlay actuaries’ averaging. Thus, strike underwriters sidestepped actuarial ratemaking to offer uniform premiums to those deemed acceptable risks. This solution not only left them susceptible to adverse selection and moral hazard but also highlighted the limits of insurers’ ability to transform uncertainty into commoditized risk, more broadly.

Recognizing these limits has important historiographical implications. Based largely on studies of life insurance—the gold standard of insurability—the rise of financial risk management has claimed a central place in the history of American capitalism. This literature thus threatens to obscure the ongoing significance of unclassifiable, unquantifiable uncertainty. Uncovering forgotten risk-making projects like attempts to establish strike insurance, where Americans grappled with the limits of insurability, is thus a crucial corrective.

The outbreak and continuation of armed hostilities can sometimes cause harm to bordering States not directly involved in the hostilities. This has occurred in many military operations conducted during the last few decades. The scope of the provisions relating to the protection of the environment during armed conflict appears to be strictly limited to the territory in which the operations are taking place. It is therefore important to determine the extent to which a belligerent State at the origin of acts that have had devastating consequences on the territory of one or more States not involved in the conflict can be held internationally responsible for those acts based on the principle of international liability for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law, which is still under discussion. The argument put forward in this article is based on the hypothesis that this principle is at least implicitly recognized when it comes to environmental damage caused in the context of an armed conflict. In our view, this is grounded both in the principle of the inviolability of neutral States and in the no-harm principle, whereby a State cannot use its territory in a way that is harmful to other States not involved in the armed conflict. These principles are based on the notions of fault and risk.

Broadening prediction efforts from imminent psychotic symptoms to neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities can enhance the accuracy of diagnosing severe mental disorders. Early interventions, especially during adolescence, are vital as these disorders often follow a long prodromal phase of neurodevelopmental disturbances. Child and adolescent mental health services should lead a developmentally-sensitive model for timely, effective detection and intervention.