This paper examines betting line changes from the opening to the closing of the point spread betting market on National Basketball Association games for evidence of informed trader betting. We show that within-betting period line changes significantly improve the accuracy of betting lines as forecasts of game outcomes. We examine individual line change magnitudes and show that these are directly and proportionately related to biases in opening lines. Further, line changes are of sufficient magnitude to remove these biases by the close of betting. We interpret these results as evidence that informed traders are influential in this market.DO DAY-TO-DAY AND WITHIN-DAY changes in asset prices reflect the incorporation of information into price? A number of recent market microstructure papers have cast doubt on the incorporation of information explanation. For example, studies of day-to-day price changes by French and Roll (1986), Roll (1988), and Cutler, Poterba, and Summers (1989 show that market volatility is much larger over periods when the market is open than over comparable periods when the market is closed, and that external news is not responsible for the majority of large daily stock price changes. The implication of this research is either that the arrival of private information causes price volatility or that trading itself introduces noise into prices. The withinday price change studies by Amihud and Mendelson (1987) and Stoll and Whaley (1990) demonstrate that prices formed at the opening of trading are more volatile than prices determined at other times of the day. These authors suggest that trading mechanisms used at the start of trading may be responsible for noisier opening prices.Efforts to validate the incorporation of information explanation have proceeded apace. At the theoretical level, for example, Romer (1993) develops a model allowing for rational changes in the market's assessment of funda-385 mentals, and hence, rational price movements, in the absence of the arrival of outside news. There are also numerous empirical studies. For example, Ederington and Lee (1993), building on the work of Harvey and Huang (1991), show that scheduled macroeconomic news announcements are responsible for most of the observed time-of-day and day-of-the-week volatility patterns in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets. Gerety and Mulherin (1994), using forty years of hourly price index data from the New York Stock Exchange, find that transitory price volatility declines steadily over the trading day. This price volatility pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that trading aids price formation rather than the alternative arguments that trading mechanisms add to price volatility at the opening or that price changes are simply noise.An impediment for all empirical research into asset price changes is the lack of an endpoint at which an objective fundamental value can be observed and compared with actual prices. As a result, neither the price formation, trading mechanism, nor noise trading hypothese...

This article examines the challenges of paying for loss caused by climate change. It discusses how weatherrelated harms might become uninsurable by private companies in the future as the adverse effects of climate change increase in severity. Additionally, this article recognizes the difficulty in imposing civil liability on wrongdoers for climate-related harms, and explores options for state-sponsored or state-subsidized insurance. Finally, the authors examine possibilities for an international insurance fund, but eventually conclude that such a fund would unlikely be endorsed at the international level and would not benefit Canadians.Cet article porte sur les défis que le fait de payer les pertes causées par le changement climatique. Il examine notamment la manière dont les dommages causés par le climat pourraient ne plus être assurables à l'avenir par les entreprises privées, alors que les effets indésirables du changement climatique continuent de s'aggraver. De plus, cet article reconnaît la difficulté d'imposer une assurance civile à l'égard des auteurs de méfaits pour les dommages reliés au changement climatique; l'article examine les options d'une assurance offerte sous l'égide d'État ou subventionnée par celui-ci. Enfin, l'auteur examine la possibilité d'une caisse de prévoyance internationale, mais arrive à la conclusion qu'une telle caisse ne serait probablement pas acceptée sur le plan international et ne profiterait pas aux Canadiens.

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The stress dependence of contact potential has been measured in copper and aluminium at very low stress levels using a sensitive ac method. The results of two experiments are presented and in both cases the effect is found to be much smaller than the free electron estimates calculated from the theory of Dessler et al.

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