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Due to climate change and an increasing concentration of the world’s population in vulnerable areas, how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly is still a universal dilemma.

This paper applies a law and economic approach.

China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risk is in many ways unique. It emphasizes government responsibilities and works well in many respects, especially in disaster emergency relief. Nonetheless, China’s mechanism which has the vestige of a centrally planned economy needs reform.

I propose a catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework which marries the merits of both the market and government to manage catastrophe risks. There are three pillars of the framework: (i) sustaining a strong and capable government; (ii) government enhancement of the market, neither supplanting nor retarding it; (iii) legalizing the relationship between government and market to prevent government from undermining well-functioning market operations. A catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework may provide insights for developing catastrophe insurance in China and other transitional nations.

First, this paper analyzes China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risks and China’s approach which emphasizes government responsibilities will shed light on solving how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly. Second, this paper starts a broader discussion about government stimulation of developing catastrophe insurance and this framework can stimulate attention to solve the universal dilemma.

Many literature teachers, operating with good intentions, include in their presentations of multicultural literature moral lessons on the importance of tolerating difference. Unfortunately, as long as teachers continue to label someone or some point of view as “diversity,” they reify the ideal of normal versus abnormal and keep the definition of the latter in the hands of the former. How can a teacher who is dedicated to teaching diversity respond to this problem? I propose that school leaders and teachers can address this dilemma through the medium of literature if reading instruction is utilized to shape students into novice narrative researchers. Working with a current teacher, I applied this approach to the graphic novel, American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) constructing a unit for ninth grade students in a suburban, Midwestern high school. The curriculum – which infuses principles of narrative research into extant district and state guidelines for teaching literature – frames the text not as a lesson in tolerance, but as a disruptive and potentially transformative experience. I include a description of this process, a selection of lessons, and reflections from the teacher. Considering these elements, I end with a reflection on the potential for narrative and disruptive methodology to (truly) promote diversity. All of us – even teachers – find it hard to confront, accept, and appreciate differences in others, but these activities also have the potential to enrich our communities and lives. Thus, we, with eyes on the future, need to foster these capacities in young people.

This paper studies the estimation of quantile regression panel duration models. We allow for the possibility of endogenous covariates and correlated individual effects in the quantile regression models. We propose a quantile regression approach for panel duration models under conditionally independent censoring. The procedure involves minimizing ℓ1 convex objective functions and is motivated by a martingale property associated with survival data in models with endogenous covariates. We carry out a series of Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the small sample performance of the proposed approach in comparison with other existing methods. An empirical application of the method to the analysis of the effect of unemployment insurance on unemployment duration illustrates the approach.