The Economics of Property-Casualty Insurance presents new research and findings on key aspects of the economics of the property-casualty insurance industry. The volume explores the industrial organization, regulation, financing, and taxation of this business. The first paper, on external financing and insurance cycles, contains a wealth of information on trends and patterns in the industry's financial structure. The last essay, which compares performance of stock and mutual insurance companies, takes a fresh look at the way a company's organizational structure affects its responses to different economic situations. Two papers focus on rate regulation in the auto insurance industry, and provide broad overviews of the structure and economics of the insurance industry as a whole. Also addressed are the system of regulating insurance companies in the United States, who insures the insurers, and the effects of tax law changes in the 1980s on the prices of insurance policies.

Regis Philbin, the king of curmudgeonly humor, has written an all-new book of side-splitting rants.No one tells a story like Regis Philbin. For fifteen years on the syndicated morning show Live! With Regis & Kathie Lee, he has kept viewers laughing out loud at his tales of comic misadventures as America's most beloved -- and beset -- everyman. Whether confessing his faults (albeit grudgingly) or sharing his latest daily aggravations, he has hilariously explored his own unique perils as a husband, father, dutiful citizen, man-about-town, high-rise-apartment dweller, weekend suburban guy, helpless handyman, woebegone traveler, frustrated sports fan, nervous medical specimen, overwhelmed public figure, and most recently, the nattily dressed host of the enormously popular ABC television quiz show sensation Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.Whether it's skewering the producers of his morning talk show, or describing the travails of celebrity life today, you can be sure that Regis Philbin will tell it like it is.Who Wants to be Me? is sure to have readers in stitches as they see themselves in Regis's outrageous mishaps and familiar foibles.

The eleventh edition in the series, the Human Development Report 2000: Human Development and Human Rights provides a thought provoking analysis of these two interrelated and intertwined issues. Human rights and human development are mutually reinforcing and culminate in enlarged human freedom. The Report traces the history of struggle for human rights as a common human experience and outlines the new frontier of the rights agenda for the 21st Century. HDR 2000 demonstrates the ways in which human rights enrich human development goals: adding moral force and ideas of claims, duties and obligations. Human development, in turn, brings a dynamic long-term perspective to human rights and adds more concrete analysis, quantification, and must consider the human rights impacts of policy choices. The Report analyses how human rights must be respected, protected and promoted in the development process. To that end, it addresses the accountability of governments to fulfill their duties, and provides a timely analysis of the duties and obligations of newer actors in the fields of human rights and human development such as corporations, NGOs, individuals, the international community and markets. Of particular importance is consideration of how the current global economic rules and institutions address human rights issues. The Report proposes strategies for promoting development that also protect and further human rights, with significant implications for a pro-human rights approach to development. HDR 2000 includes and updates the widely respected Human Development Indicators that compare the relative levels of human development in most countries of the world, and presents data tables on all aspects of human development.

For courses in Financial Accounting, Financial Reporting, Financial Statement Analysis, Introduction to Business, or MBA finance courses. Understanding the Corporate Annual Report: Nuts, Bolts, and A Few Loose Screws provides a clearly written, step-by-step guide to understanding corporate annual reports. Authors Fraser and Ormiston instruct readers on how to ignore the PR letters from the corporate management team, engaging graphics, and other "garnishes" that typically accompany current annual reports in order to focus on what really counts--a company's performance and financial health! Throughout the text, the authors examine management's attempts to manipulate earnings and other performance measures, and they explain what the numbers in the report really mean.