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The phrase "collateral damage" refers to harm done to persons, animals, or things that agents are not morally permitted to target in the conduct of war, as a side effect of attacks on persons, animals, or things that agents are morally permitted to target in the conduct of war. Call the first category that is, those persons, animals, or things that agents are not morally permitted to target - illegitimate targets of war, and the second category legitimate targets of war. Collateral damage, then, refers to harm done to illegitimate targets of war as a side effect of attacks on legitimate targets of war. As this characterization indicates, a complete response to the question of when, if ever, acts of war that cause collateral damage are morally justifiable must address harm done to private and public property, domestic and wild animals, and the environment. In this essay, however, I will focus solely on harm done to persons who are illegitimate targets of war, as a side effect of attacks on legitimate targets. My reason for doing so is twofold. First, most historical and contemporary discussion focuses on the rightness or wrongness of this particular kind of collateral damage. Second, rightly or wrongly, most people appear to be more concerned with harm done to persons than they are with harm done to animals, the environment, or inanimate objects.

"We examine how collateral affects the cost of debt capital. Theories based on borrower moral hazard and limited pledgeable income predict that collateral increases the availability of credit and reduces its price. Testing these theories is complicated by the very selection problem which they imply: creditors will demand collateral precisely from those borrowers who are riskier. This selection problem leads to a positive relation in the data between the presence of collateral and the loan yield. Analyzing the extensive margin of collateral use, therefore, masks the hypothesized negative impact that collateral exhibits on debt yields. In this paper, we alleviate this problem by focusing on a particular industry and examining its intensive, rather than extensive, margin of collateral use. Using a novel data set of secured debt issued by U.S. airlines, we construct industry-specific measures of collateral redeployability. We show that debt tranches that are secured by more redeployable collateral exhibit lower credit spreads, higher credit ratings, and higher loan-to-value ratios -- an effect which our estimates show to be economically sizeable. Our results suggest that the ability to pledge collateral, and in particular redeployable collateral, lowers the cost of external financing and increases debt capacity"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Collateral Survivorship" analyzes my collegial friendship with a renowned fiction writer recently described as a "skilled predator" in an investigation of sexual harassment and abuse at an elite private academy in New England. Written for an audience of other scholars and writers, my essay is neither an indictment nor a defense; it's an investigation of the forms of socialization that make even women like myself (feminist writers and scholars) vulnerable to such men. In short, "Collateral Survivorship" is focused upon the heterosexual erotics of instruction, not a particular individual.

Short-term collateralized debt, private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally insensitive debt, firms with low quality collateral can borrow, generating a credit boom and an increase in output. Financial fragility is endogenous; it builds up over time as information about counterparties decays. A crisis occurs when a ( possibly small) shock causes agents to suddenly have incentives to produce information, leading to a decline in output. A social planner would produce more information than private agents but would not always want to eliminate fragility. (JEL D83, E23, E32, E44, G01)

Due to a dearth of data, nineteenth century lending to sovereign borrowers was a blind date. We argue this is the reason for collateral pledges found in contemporary lending covenants, which enabled not execution, but the production of reliable fiscal data. Lawyers injected collateral clauses in sovereign debt covenants to permit credible disclosure of hard-to-access tax data. The study foregrounds the importance of big law firms as financial intermediaries and information producers. It also contributes a new view on the role played by contracts in sovereign debt.
"No [underwriting] firm can take precautions against the repudiation of a [sovereign] hypothecation."—Thomas Baring, 1865