厉以宁将经济学研究视为“拓荒”，将经济学家喻为“拓荒人”。他说，“许多资料由我们去收集，许多问题靠我们去发现，新领域将由我们去开辟，新道路将由我们去探索，新的解答也将由我们提出。”厉以宁关于发展与贫困治理的思想，拓展了发展经济学对于转型问题的认识，深化了制度经济学和新制度经济学对于产权变革的分析，拓宽了区域经济学关于区域发展战略和解决贫困问题的思路。

Past studies typically have focused on whether people perceive more rare risk after experiencing catastrophic disasters. We show that people can also feel less risk with unexpected "lucky" disaster experience. By exploring a novel identification strategy based on households' expectations, we find that households perceive less (more) risk when they experience disasters that have lower (higher) actual fatalities than what was expected. This opposite experience effect of rare disasters is substantial: a one standard deviation increase in the negative (positive) experience shock is associated with a 1.71% decrease (a 1.31% increase) in the life insurance-to-portfolio ratio. We discuss three possible mechanisms to account for our empirical findings: incomplete information learning, salience theory, and change in risk preferences.