This book focuses on two central aspects of the risk managing process, namely 1. how managers (can and do) assess developments in the external risk environment and deal with them, and 2. analysing the effects of risk management and different managerial approaches. The articles represent state of the art academic analyses and research contributions.

Your step-by-step guide to financial peace of mind! How can you become financially secure with the resources at your disposal? What is the safest way to invest and accumulate money? And why is it never too late to start planning your financial well-being? In this new, updated edition of the bestselling Become Your Own Financial Advisor, all of this, and much, much more, is explained.

Money plays a role in nearly every aspect of our lives, and yet very few of us know how to save, where to invest and how to avoid money troubles. This highly accessible book is aimed at anyone who wants to improve their financial situation, from the financial novice who needs clear basic guidelines on how to deal with money, to those who are more financially savvy but want to supplement their knowledge.

Covering a range of topics, from saving, investing, debt management and buying a house to blunders to avoid, Become Your Own Financial Advisor provides people of all ages and levels of wealth with practical information on how to improve their finances. In the process, it shows that financial freedom is possible for everyone. This, the second edition of Become Your Own Financial Advisor, has been updated with new types of investments, fresh approaches to technology, the latest tax information and further feedback on ‘Julia’, the savings rock star.

Given the increased impact of non-market forces on business reputation, there has never been a greater need to grasp corporate social performance. This book demonstrates that a holistic perspective on corporate citizenship that accommodates the importance of profits and other time-honored social values is both desirable and possible.

This work offers a concise explanation of the fundamentals of financial forecasting intended for managers in accounting, marketing, sales, and strategic planning. As the authors point out, financial forecasting is more than the annual genertion of sales forecasts and budgets. It is a comprehensive process that looks at every aspect of a company's operations in order to determine the likely aspect on profits of a number of internal and external forces. Each of the steps in this complex process is fully described in this books so that the reader gains an understanding of how to produce effective financial forecasts for his or her own firm. Throughout, numerous tables and figures illustrate points made in the test. "Credit Executive"

In an era of deregulation, tax revisions, cost cutting, and unpredictable markets, sound financial planning is a critical variable in any company's continued profitability. This book offers a clear, concise explanation of the fundamentals of financial forecasting intended for managers in accounting, marketing, sales, and strategic planning. As the authors point out, financial forecasting is more than the annual generation of sales forecasts and budgets--it is a comprehensive process that looks at every aspect of a company's operations in order to determine the likely impact on profits of a number of internal and external forces. Each of the steps in this complex process is fully described here so that the reader gains a complete understanding of how to produce effective financial forecasts for his or her own firm.

Probabilistic Methods for Financial and Marketing Informatics aims to provide students with insights and a guide explaining how to apply probabilistic reasoning to business problems. Rather than dwelling on rigor, algorithms, and proofs of theorems, the authors concentrate on showing examples and using the software package Netica to represent and solve problems. The book contains unique coverage of probabilistic reasoning topics applied to business problems, including marketing, banking, operations management, and finance. It shares insights about when and why probabilistic methods can and cannot be used effectively. This book is recommended for all R&D professionals and students who are involved with industrial informatics, that is, applying the methodologies of computer science and engineering to business or industry information. This includes computer science and other professionals in the data management and data mining field whose interests are business and marketing information in general, and who want to apply AI and probabilistic methods to their problems in order to better predict how well a product or service will do in a particular market, for instance. Typical fields where this technology is used are in advertising, venture capital decision making, operational risk measurement in any industry, credit scoring, and investment science.

Kasper's book is the first to explain the why, not just the how, in the valuation of privately held businesses, and as such makes a unique contribution to its field. Among its many points, the book makes clear that there is no small stock premium, current valuation practice produces business valuations that are too subjective, and tax precedents and laws do not govern business valuations for other purposes. A truly multidisciplinary approach to the advanced study of valuation theory and practice, the book critically examines the many common practices and assumptions accepted by certain appraisers and finds them wanting. It is thus an in-depth exploration of the foundation of current valuation practice, and the evidence that supposedly supports or refutes traditional wisdom. With easily grasped numerical examples and case studies from Kasper's wide professional experience, this work is an important source of information, knowledge, and applications for professional and academics alike, not only in accounting and related fields, but also in management, investment, and law.

Kasper begins with a discussion of the most quoted authority in business valuation, Revenue Ruling 59-60. For attorneys, this is probably the single richest source of cross examination material available (and the ruling appears in its entirety in the Appendix). Although Kasper concentrates on developing the conceptual foundations of valuation, he also explores more practical matters and their meanings, such as fair market values, valuations for tax purposes, and trial strategy. Kasper points out that some of the conclusions he offers are controversial, but if the logic underlying them is understood, their truth will soon be apparent. He also argues convincingly that theory is not just for academics, but can be a useful tool to understand how the real world works--and why it often fails.

Social and environmental issues can be very complex and overwhelming for managers. A partnership seems like an obvious solution. But what type of partnership is appropriate, what are the pitfalls and how can they be overcome? The authors use the experiences of a number of experts in companies, NGOs and governmental bodies to find the answers.

Especially in times of an economic boom following a crisis, companies have to deal with the phenomenon of the "working capital trap," which signifies a company's increasing need for financial liquidity in times of hindered access to debt capital, caused by the increasingly restrictive credit approval processes of financial institutions. As a consequence of cost savings, this situation is often reinforced by a low level of inventory.

This book takes up the problem and shows ways of escaping the "trap" by identifying and strengthening in-house financing potential. First, different operating ratios will be introduced. These refer to the amount of capital committed to the flow of goods and to the amount of in-house financing possible. Subsequently, methods for consolidating in-house financing that are affected by procurement processes will be presented from the company's and the supply chain's perspective.

From a company's perspective, the methods for consolidating the amount of in-house financing over the following topics: The Management of Payment Terms, Inventory Management and Product Group and Supplier Management

From the supply chain's perspective, the following methods for extending the possible amount of in-house financing will be discussed: Finance-Oriented Supply Chain Sourcing, Supply Chain-Oriented Supplier Financing, Collaborative Cash-to-Cash Management, Collaborative Cash Pooling and Netting, Supply Chain Financing Platforms.

The conceptual models will be clarified using a practical example from the automobile industry. Finally, the "Procurement Value Added" (PVA(c)) approach will be presented, a concept that measures the contribution of procurement to the company's success.

Cutback management is a way of life for most public and private sector organizations today, and the factors leading to its presence are expected to be felt well into the 1990's and beyond. At the same time, organizations are being faced with a changed internal culture where employees want and need to be involved in decisions that affect them. The author, who has been at the forefront of assisting organizations in effectively managing both external and internal change, explores the trends impacting state and local governments in the next decade and beyond, describes the cutback management environment that policy and decision makers face, and lays out effective approaches to deal with this environment from the bottom of the organization upward. In this manner, organizations that identify techniques to improve revenues and reduce costs can find lasting solutions that are accepted at all organizational levels.

After reviewing the 15 major trends expected to impact state and local governments during the 1990's and beyond, the author describes the cutback management environment being faced by most state and local governments. He then describes in detail how to set a direction to address the cutback management environment through the application of strategic planning and goes on to describe how to organize around critical success factors in order to focus resources on achievement of the organizational mission in light of external and internal environmental factors. He explores various techniques for improving employee productivity, ranging from the use of new technology to better management systems to various types of employee involvement. He then discusses the importance of values in the achievement of a shared organizational vision and describes various employee involvement processes that can be used to secure buy-in by employees at all levels where organizational changes are underway. Among other issues explored in depth are the use of matrix management to improve productivity in a project-oriented environment and contingency planning to deal with unforeseen events. The book culminates with a description of how to use strategic management as a day-to-day tool for effective bottom-up cutback management, and provides real-life case situations of how state and local governments are effectively dealing with the cutback and involvement processes. This book is aimed at state and local government policy and decision makers.

Emilia Mendes discusses stepwise regression modelling, care-based reasoning, and classification and regression trees. It will help small web development companies improve their cost estimation process.

The purpose of this book is to offer a more systematic and structured treatment of the research on accounting-based valuation, with a primary focus on recent theoretical developments and the resulting empirical analyses that recognize the role of accounting information in making managerial decisions. Since its inception, valuation research in accounting has evolved primarily along an "empirically driven" path. In the absence of models constructed specifically to explain this topic, researchers have relied on economic intuition and theories from other disciplines (mainly finance and economics) as a basis for designing empirical analyses and interpreting findings. Although this literature has shed important light on the usefulness of accounting information in capital markets, it is obvious that the lack of a rigorous theoretical framework has hindered the establishment of a systematic and well-structured literature and made it difficult to probe valuation issues in depth. More recently, however, progress has been made on the theoretical front. The two most prominent frameworks are (i) the "linear information dynamic approach" and (ii) the "real options-based approach" which recognizes managerial uses of accounting information in the pursuit of value generation. This volume devotes its initial chapters to an evaluation of the models using the linear dynamic approach, and then provides a synthesis of the theoretical studies that adopt the real options approach and the empirical works which draw on them. The book also makes an attempt to revisit and critique existing empirical research (value-relevance and earnings-response studies) within the real options-based framework. It is hoped that the book can heighten interest in integrating theoretical and empirical research in this field, and play a role in helping this literature develop into a more structured and cohesive body of work. Value is of ultimate concern to economic decision-makers, and valuation theory should serve as a platform for studying other accounting topics. The book ends with a call for increased links of other areas of accounting research to valuation theory.

The goal of investment management is to achieve the investor's required rate of return by putting assets to their most productive use. The return should compensate the investor for the time during which the funds are committed, the expected rate of inflation and the uncertainty of the anticipated future financial benefits from the investment. Investment management is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to investment analysis and portfolio management, specifically in the South African context. Investment management provides a broad framework and a thorough network of guidelines for the investment management student. It focuses on investment in financial assets such as shares and bonds, and explains both fundamental and technical analysis. It investigates portfolio management and how derivative instruments such as futures, options and swaps may be used for this purpose. A chapter is devoted to the foreign exchange market and its management, and a chapter dealing with the governance of investment management is included. By means of self-assessment questions at the end of each chapter, it prepares undergraduates for postgraduate study and is written with the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA (R)) Level I learning outcomes in mind. Investment management is aimed at undergraduate investment management students.

From an institutional perspective, the book carries out comparative analysis of 'the power of the purse.' It explores cross-national differences, their determinants and their impact on fiscal policy. The empirical analysis is based on a dataset of legislative budgeting in all 30 OECD countries, a broader 80-country dataset, and case study evidence.

Investors receive thousands of business plans, but only a few businesses receive funding. While there are many "how-tos" out there for entrepreneurs, no one has focused on the mind-set, tools, and foundation that are important to investors, and therefore essential to entrepreneurs. Getting Funded examines and develops a framework on which to base a business concept, conduct due diligence research and risk analysis, refine a business model and reformulate a business strategy, and develop a risk and reward structure that protects investment money and incentivizes entrepreneurs to successfully manage the opportunity to create and share value. Getting Funded shows entrepreneurs the tools and framework critical to a venture's success, teaching entrepreneurs to refine their business model and strategy as well as to develop an investment model to improve the investability of the venture and thereby increase the chances of getting funded. Even without the need for external funding, these tools will improve a venture's potential odds of success. Listen to the author discuss the book on the UK-based radio show, The Evening Show with Simon Rose.

"The successful entrepreneur must confront and overcome legal, financial, and business obstacles. Marc J. Lane has done a wonderful job of addressing all of these in one very readable and sensible book."—Thomas Morsch, Director, Small Business Opportunity Center, Northwestern University School of Law

Advising Entrepreneurs helps you address the special needs of your entrepreneurial clients. With the growing interest in starting small businesses, entrepreneurs are looking for expert advice and guidance to help them overcome the legal, tax, and financial challenges they face.

This book outlines solutions and ideas that you can use to steer your entrepreneurial clients through the rough waters of starting a new business. From getting a business on its feet to preparing for an IPO, you will learn the different strategies and options available to your clients.

The role of a financial advisor has expanded in scope and importance with the growth of new businesses. Take this opportunity to broaden your financial planning skills and learn how to advise your entrepreneurial clients in the best way possible.

Recent events like the BSE and GM food crises, and the Concorde crash in July 2000, have illustrated that large private and public sector organisations are vulnerable and can suffer from major disruption to their business. Awareness of the need to develop expertise in risk management has grown and as a result new programs of research and teaching in risk and crisis management are being developed at universities. The contributions to this volume have been selected by adopting a multi-disciplinary approach to risk, and by considering the implications for management, business and society. The contributions are written by recognized experts in their fields and represent a unique collection of papers on the topic. Audience: The book will be of benefit to scientists, managers, politicians and trainers in academia, business and industry involved in risk analysis, assessment and management, regulation and deregulation of risk, crisis management and accidents and disasters.

A collaborative approach to grant seeking can stimulate and reshape the culture of your library organization. The exciting and rewarding activities of developing a successful grants program can yield enormous dividends for the benefit of your staff, patrons, and community. Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians will share new insights for those who want to access grant funding without reinventing the wheel. Based on years of practical grant writing and collaboration development experience, this resource provides a complete guide for setting up a library grant-seeking program, and for combining forces with community partners to increase grant funding to libraries. Venturing into the grants world can be scary and unpredictable. This book offers detailed strategies and practical steps to establish a supportive and collaborative environment that creates the capacity to consistently develop fundable proposals, and gives readers the confidence needed to make grant-seeking activities commonplace within libraries. Collaborative Grant Seeking will share featured topics unavailable in other grant writing publications, such as: *interpreting sponsor guidelines *identifying appropriate funding programs *determining the feasibility of project ideas *asset-based (vs. need-based) proposal development strategies *actual examples of successful and unusual library projects *initiating and sustaining collaborative relationships

Since its inception, several lawsuits have been filed under the Sarbanes Oxley Act, some corporate executives are serving, or are about to serve jail sentences, and several hundred million dollars has been wiped off the share price of affected companies. In this book, McGill & Sheppey examine how compliance is achieved and maintained. It explores the startegies and tool sets that have led compnaies to successfully manage compliance and suggests effective measures for implemantation.

The author, with the cooperation of the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office, analyzes the efficiency of the Small Business Administration. In the book's seven chapters Rhyne examines loan rate defaults, the subsidy issue, how banks respond to incentives to lend, and the philosophic question of the ultimate purpose of the SBA program. Coverage includes historical aspects, the life cycle of SBA loans, and various policy and financial issues of SBA programs. Rhyne is critical of the SBA loan guarantees; she presents recommendations for reforms and discusses the implications for other credit programs. . . . Original government data sources were used extensively in the research, making the work quite definitive as of the publishing date. Choice

The Small Business Administration (SBA) loan guarantee program--one of the mainstays of small business financing--has been both sharply attacked as wasteful and staunchly defended as essential during recent debates over the Federal budget. This book clarifies the reasons for the often heated debate and offers new insights into whether the program does indeed subsidize the weak or perform a valuable service in bridging the small business credit gap. Rhyne argues persuasively that despite recent program improvements, the SBA allows a hefty subsidy to continue by tolerating frequent, costly defaults. She recommends that the program seek to become financially self-sustaining, thereby adopting a simple market-making function rather than a credit allocation role.

The book with a brief history of the SBA program and its predecessor in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The author describes the prograM's political environment and demonstrates the central role of banks in the program. She then moves to a thorough analysis of the prograM's financial performance and assesses the impact of SBA loans on banks. Subsequent chapters examine the cost of the program to the SBA, the social goals of the program and how well it fulfills them, and the changes made in the program during the 1980s to improve its management efficiency. The final chapter explores policy changes that could improve the prograM's overall performance and offers recommendations for reform ranging from minor management improvements to major program restructuring. A landmark critique of a major governmental program and its impact on the business community, this book should be read by every banker, small business owner, and legislator with an interest in the fate of the SBA loan guarantee program, or in the government's role in credit allocation.

This book critically engages with how the conservation of tropical rainforests is financed. Beginning with the context of tropical deforestation, alongside an overview of tropical ecology, global environmental policy and finance, the book reviews several conservation financing instruments. These include ecotourism and private reserves, debt-for-nature swaps and government domestic budgetary expenditures for state and national parks. Tropical deforestation and forest degradation are serious global environmental issues, contributing to global climate change, species extinction, and threatening the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. Yet, many leading companies, individuals and governments are making a positive impact on tropical forest conservation to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through the use of conservation finance. Conservation of Tropical Rainforests tells the history of international conservation finance and provides a variety of options for individuals, businesses, and governments to support conservation financing projects.

Financing Life Science Innovation reviews the literature on venture capital, corporate governance, and life science venturing and presents a study of the Swedish life science industry and the venture capital investors being active in financially and managerially supporting life science start-up firms.

This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

Leasing is by far the most important source of finance for various types of assets needed by firms, but this may cause problems. Among them are the decisions to buy or lease and the accounting decisions to capitalize or expense. Riahi-Belkaoui addresses both problems by examining the models and standards used both for management of and accounting for leases.

In five chapters Riahi-Belkaoui covers the issues involved in leasing and financing decision models and offers a decision format to reconcile disagreements among various approaches to the lease-or-buy analysis. He examines all the techniques proposed for accounting for long-term leases as formulated by the Statement of Accounting Standards No. 13 and then looks at specific issues. In his final chapter, a unique contribution to the literature on leasing, Riahi-Belkaoui explores the economics of buying. This is a valuable resource for financial accountants, decision makers, and researchers interested in the management of leases.

Fertakis here offers a comprehensive discussion of administrative controls as they apply to major organizations, with particular emphasis on the interrelationship between accounting and administrative controls. As Fertakis notes at the outset, control in organizations is often poorly understood and inadequately implemented. His clear, practically oriented discussion of the design, purpose, and effective implementation of an administrative control system is intended to enable the reader to obtain a working familiarity with both the methods and problems involved and the benefits to be derived from establishing such a system.

Fertakis' extensive coverage of the subject encompasses such critical aspects as the structure of operations controls, the relationship between organizational goals and the control environment, the measurement of performance, and the characteristics of a good business plan. He explains the operations controls process, taking the reader through the manufacturing, marketing, service, and project stages. Separate chapters are devoted in turn to financial, audit-related, budgetary, asset, and system-related controls. Finally, three chapters address special administrative control applications including controls in the legal environment, in the international organization, and in various nontraditional types of organization. Financial executives will find this volume a useful and frequently consulted resource.

With the Common Core poised to markedly amplify the accountability stakes in public education, the pressure to post steep outcomes gains has never been fiercer. Unsurprisingly, flashy and expensive school improvement initiatives that promise quick fix solutions have become pervasively en vogue across the K-12 landscape. As Justin A. Collins compellingly demonstrates in Burning Cash, these flashy acronym reform plans provide for abundantly vivid theatre, but offer no muscle for the heavy lifting required to transform instructional quality. Collins pens a forceful case that despite the dizzying change swirling around the classroom walls, student engagement remains a fixture of a paramount importance. Taking a decided detour from the student engagement literature to date, Burning Cash spells out an entirely fresh means of numerically charting student engagement levels across all classrooms over time. Were the status quo to instead persist, a high school diploma will remain the end of the educational line for millions of schoolchildren. By reliably quantifying the nature of student engagement at the classroom level, teachers and administrators are supplied a powerfully telling barometer by which to gauge educational quality. Also left at educational leaders' disposal are data-informed guideposts that illuminate the improvement work left to be done. As Los Angeles Schools' John Deasy champions in the book's foreword, when student higher-order thinking balloons and disengagement is eradicated, test score spikes are extreme and sustained, no matter the school district's zip code. And that means the promise of the American dream is enlivened without additionally burdening deficit-riddled budgets.