The volume highlights the state-of-the-art knowledge (including data analysis) of productivity, inequality and efficiency analysis. It showcases a selection of the best papers from the 9th North American Productivity Workshop. These papers are relevant to academia, but also to public and private sectors in terms of the challenges that firms, financial institutions, governments, and individuals may face when dealing with economic and education related activities that lead to increase or decrease of productivity. The volume also aims to bring together ideas from different parts of the world about the challenges those local economies and institutions may face when changes in productivity are observed. These contributions focus on theoretical and empirical research in areas including productivity, production theory and efficiency measurement in economics, management science, operation research, public administration, and education. The North American Productivity Workshop (NAPW) brings together academic scholars and practitioners in the field of productivity and efficiency analysis from all over the world, and this proceedings volume is a reflection of this mission. The papers in this volume also address general topics as education, health, energy, finance, agriculture, transport, utilities, and economic development, among others. The editors are comprised of the 2016 local organizers, program committee members, and celebrated guest conference speakers.

This book examines the macroeconomic and regulatory impact of domestic and international shocks on the South African economy resulting from the 2009 financial crisis. It also assesses the impact of the US economy's eventual recovery from the crisis and the prospect of higher US interest rates in future. Told in three parts, the book explores associations between economic growth, policy uncertainty and the key domestic and international transmission channels, and transmission effects, of global financial regulatory and domestic macro-economic uncertainties on subdued and volatile economic recovery, financial channels, lending rate margins, and credit growth. The book concludes by extending its focus to the role of US monetary policy, capital flows and rand/US dollar volatility on the South African economy.

Now in its fifth edition, this book offers a detailed yet concise introduction to the growing field of statistical applications in finance. The reader will learn the basic methods for evaluating option contracts, analyzing financial time series, selecting portfolios and managing risks based on realistic assumptions about market behavior. The focus is both on the fundamentals of mathematical finance and financial time series analysis, and on applications to specific problems concerning financial markets, thus making the book the ideal basis for lectures, seminars and crash courses on the topic. All numerical calculations are transparent and reproducible using quantlets. For this new edition the book has been updated and extensively revised and now includes several new aspects such as neural networks, deep learning, and crypto-currencies. Both R and Matlab code, together with the data, can be downloaded from the book's product page and the Quantlet platform. The Quantlet platform quantlet.de, quantlet.com, quantlet.org is an integrated QuantNet environment consisting of different types of statistics-related documents and program codes. Its goal is to promote reproducibility and offer a platform for sharing validated knowledge native to the social web. QuantNet and the corresponding Data-Driven Documents-based visualization allow readers to reproduce the tables, pictures and calculations inside this Springer book. "This book provides an excellent introduction to the tools from probability and statistics necessary to analyze financial data. Clearly written and accessible, it will be very useful to students and practitioners alike." Yacine Ait-Sahalia, Otto Hack 1903 Professor of Finance and Economics, Princeton University

This book pulls together robust practices in Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) from other disciplines and shows how they can be used in the area of Banking and Finance. In terms of empirical analysis techniques, Banking and Finance is a conservative discipline. As such, this book will raise awareness of the potential of PLS-SEM for application in various contexts. PLS-SEM is a non-parametric approach designed to maximize explained variance in latent constructs. Latent constructs are directly unobservable phenomena such as customer service quality and managerial competence. Explained variance refers to the extent we can predict, say, customer service quality, by examining other theoretically related latent constructs such as conduct of staff and communication skills. Examples of latent constructs at the microeconomic level include customer service quality, managerial effectiveness, perception of market leadership, etc.; macroeconomic-level latent constructs would be found in contagion of systemic risk from one financial sector to another, herd behavior among fund managers, risk tolerance in financial markets, etc. Behavioral Finance is bound to provide a wealth of opportunities for applying PLS-SEM. The book is designed to expose robust processes in application of PLS-SEM, including use of various software packages and codes, including R. PLS-SEM is already a popular tool in marketing and management information systems used to explain latent constructs. Until now, PLS-SEM has not enjoyed a wide acceptance in Banking and Finance. Based on recent research developments, this book represents the first collection of PLS-SEM applications in Banking and Finance. This book will serve as a reference book for those researchers keen on adopting PLS-SEM to explain latent constructs in Banking and Finance.

Since the global financial crisis began in 2008-2009, there has been a strong decline in financial markets and investment, and significant economic recession for most developed and emerging economies. Accordingly, new forms of alternative finance, management, control, accounting, trading and investment are being sought. Alternative finance presents challenges intended to stimulate investment and promote economic growth and development, as well as provide a return on investment during turbulent times. This volume aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of alternative finance in its various forms. It addresses the impact of the financial crisis and the failure of monetary and financial institutions to manage financial markets and handle the recent downturn. It also presents and discusses new research findings associated with alternative forms of investment and finance, and their economic and political implications.

This book describes a maximally simple market risk model that is still practical and main risk measures like the value-at-risk and the expected shortfall. It outlines the model's (i) underlying math, (ii) daily operation, and (iii) implementation, while stripping away statistical overhead to keep the concepts accessible. The author selects and weighs the various model features, motivating the choices under real-world constraints, and addresses the evermore important handling of regulatory requirements. The book targets not only practitioners new to the field but also experienced market risk operators by suggesting useful data analysis procedures and implementation details. It furthermore addresses market risk consumers such as managers, traders, and compliance officers by making the model behavior intuitively transparent. A very useful guide to the theoretical and practical aspects of implementing and operating a risk-monitoring system for a mid-size financial institution. It sets a common body of knowledge to facilitate communication between risk managers, computer and investment specialists by bridging their diverse backgrounds. Giovanni Barone-Adesi - Professor, Universita della Svizzera italiana This unassuming and insightful book starts from the basics and plainly brings the reader up to speed on both theory and implementation. Shane Hegarty - Director Trade Floor Risk Management, Scotiabank Visit the book's website at www.value-at-risk.com.

This textbook discusses central statistical concepts and their use in business and economics. To endure the hardship of abstract statistical thinking, business and economics students need to see interesting applications at an early stage. Accordingly, the book predominantly focuses on exercises, several of which draw on simple applications of non-linear theory. The main body presents central ideas in a simple, straightforward manner; the exposition is concise, without sacrificing rigor. The book bridges the gap between theory and applications, with most exercises formulated in an economic context. Its simplicity of style makes the book suitable for students at any level, and every chapter starts out with simple problems. Several exercises, however, are more challenging, as they are devoted to the discussion of non-trivial economic problems where statistics plays a central part.

This textbook gives a comprehensive introduction to stochastic processes and calculus in the fields of finance and economics, more specifically mathematical finance and time series econometrics. Over the past decades stochastic calculus and processes have gained great importance, because they play a decisive role in the modeling of financial markets and as a basis for modern time series econometrics. Mathematical theory is applied to solve stochastic differential equations and to derive limiting results for statistical inference on nonstationary processes. This introduction is elementary and rigorous at the same time. On the one hand it gives a basic and illustrative presentation of the relevant topics without using many technical derivations. On the other hand many of the procedures are presented at a technically advanced level: for a thorough understanding, they are to be proven. In order to meet both requirements jointly, the present book is equipped with a lot of challenging problems at the end of each chapter as well as with the corresponding detailed solutions. Thus the virtual text - augmented with more than 60 basic examples and 40 illustrative figures - is rather easy to read while a part of the technical arguments is transferred to the exercise problems and their solutions.

Practically all donor countries that give aid claim to do so on the basis on the recipient's good governance, but do these claims have a real impact on the allocation of aid? Are democratic, human rights-respecting, countries with low levels of corruption and military expenditures actually likely to receive more aid than other countries?
Using econometric analysis, the author examines the factors that really determine the patterns of aid giving. The author analyses such examples as:
* aggregate aid flows
* aid from multilateral organisations such as the EU and the UN
* aid from bilateral donors such as Germany, Japan, the US as well as Arab donors.
This concise, well argued and well researched book will be a great read for students, academics and policy-makers involved in development studies, economics and international relations.

Bayesian econometric methods have enjoyed an increase in popularity in recent years. Econometricians, empirical economists, and policymakers are increasingly making use of Bayesian methods. This handbook is a single source for researchers and policymakers wanting to learn about Bayesian methods in specialized fields, and for graduate students seeking to make the final step from textbook learning to the research frontier. It contains contributions by leading Bayesians on the latest developments in their specific fields of expertise. The volume provides broad coverage of the application of Bayesian econometrics in the major fields of economics and related disciplines, including macroeconomics, microeconomics, finance, and marketing. It reviews the state of the art in Bayesian econometric methodology, with chapters on posterior simulation and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, Bayesian nonparametric techniques, and the specialized tools used by Bayesian time series econometricians such as state space models and particle filtering. It also includes chapters on Bayesian principles and methodology.

This is the first monograph that discusses in detail the interactions between Fourier analysis and dynamic economic theories, in particular, business cycles.Many economic theories have analyzed cyclical behaviors of economic variables. In this book, the focus is on a couple of trials: (1) the Kaldor theory and (2) the Slutsky effect. The Kaldor theory tries to explain business fluctuations in terms of nonlinear, 2nd-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In order to explain periodic behaviors of a solution, the Hopf-bifurcation theorem frequently plays a key role. Slutsky's idea is to look at the periodic movement as an overlapping effect of random shocks. The Slutsky process is a weakly stationary process, the periodic (or almost periodic) behavior of which can be analyzed by the Bochner theorem. The goal of this book is to give a comprehensive and rigorous justification of these ideas. Therefore, the aim is first to give a complete theory that supports the Hopf theorem and to prove the existence of periodic solutions of ODEs; and second to explain the mathematical structure of the Bochner theorem and its relation to periodic (or almost periodic) behaviors of weakly stationary processes.Although these two targets are the principal ones, a large number of results from Fourier analysis must be prepared in order to reach these goals. The basic concepts and results from classical as well as generalized Fourier analysis are provided in a systematic way.Prospective readers are assumed to have sufficient knowledge of real, complex analysis. However, necessary economic concepts are explained in the text, making this book accessible even to readers without a background in economics.

This book covers the basics of processing and spectral analysis of monovariate discrete-time signals. The approach is practical, the aim being to acquaint the reader with the indications for and drawbacks of the various methods and to highlight possible misuses. The book is rich in original ideas, visualized in new and illuminating ways, and is structured so that parts can be skipped without loss of continuity. Many examples are included, based on synthetic data and real measurements from the fields of physics, biology, medicine, macroeconomics etc., and a complete set of MATLAB exercises requiring no previous experience of programming is provided. Prior advanced mathematical skills are not needed in order to understand the contents: a good command of basic mathematical analysis is sufficient. Where more advanced mathematical tools are necessary, they are included in an Appendix and presented in an easy-to-follow way. With this book, digital signal processing leaves the domain of engineering to address the needs of scientists and scholars in traditionally less quantitative disciplines, now facing increasing amounts of data.

This proceedings volume examines the state-of-the art of productivity and efficiency analysis and adds to the existing research by bringing together a selection of the best papers from the 8th North American Productivity Workshop (NAPW). It also aims to analyze world-wide perspectives on challenges that local economies and institutions may face when changes in productivity are observed. The volume comprises of seventeen papers that deal with productivity measurement, productivity growth, dynamics of productivity change, measures of labor productivity, measures of technical efficiency in different sectors, frontier analysis, measures of performance, industry instability and spillover effects. These papers are relevant to academia, but also to public and private sectors in terms of the challenges firms, financial institutions, governments and individuals may face when dealing with economic and education related activities that lead to increase or decrease of productivity. The North American Productivity Workshop brings together academic scholars and practitioners in the field of productivity and efficiency analysis from all over the world. It is a four day conference exploring topics related to productivity, production theory and efficiency measurement in economics, management science, operations research, public administration, and related fields. The papers in this volume also address general topics as health, energy, finance, agriculture, utilities, and economic dev elopment, among others. The editors are comprised of the 2014 local organizers, program committee members, and celebrated guest conference speakers.

The theme of this book is health outcomes in India, in particular to outcomes relating to its caste and religious groups and, within these groups, to their women and children. The book's tenor is analytical and based upon a rigorous examination of recent data from both government and non-government sources. The major areas covered are sanitation, use by mothers of the government's child development services, child malnutrition, deaths in families, gender discrimination, and the measurement of welfare.

This book focuses on quantitative survey methodology, data collection and cleaning methods. Providing starting tools for using and analyzing a file once a survey has been conducted, it addresses fields as diverse as advanced weighting, editing, and imputation, which are not well-covered in corresponding survey books. Moreover, it presents numerous empirical examples from the author's extensive research experience, particularly real data sets from multinational surveys.

Factor models have become the most successful tool in the analysis and forecasting of high-dimensional time series. This monograph provides an extensive account of the so-called General Dynamic Factor Model methods. The topics covered include: asymptotic representation problems, estimation, forecasting, identification of the number of factors, identification of structural shocks, volatility analysis, and applications to macroeconomic and financial data.

This proceedings volume presents new methods and applications in applied economic research with an emphasis on advances in panel data analysis. Featuring papers presented at the 2017 International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE) held at Coventry University, this volume provides current research on econometric panel data methodologies as they are applied in microeconomics, macroeconomics, financial economics and agricultural economics. International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE) is an annual conference that started in 2008 designed to bring together economists from different fields of applied economic research in order to share methods and ideas. Applied economics is a rapidly growing field of economics that combines economic theory with econometrics to analyse economic problems of the real world usually with economic policy interest. In addition, there is growing interest in the field for panel data estimation methods, tests and techniques. This volume makes a contribution in the field of applied economic research in this area. Featuring country specific studies, this book will be of interest to academics, students, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in applied economics and economic policy.

These proceedings highlight research on the latest trends and methods in experimental and behavioral economics. Featuring contributions presented at the 2017 Computational Methods in Experimental Economics (CMEE) conference, which was held in Lublin, Poland, it merges findings from various domains to present deep insights into topics such as game theory, decision theory, cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The fields of experimental economics and behavioral economics are rapidly evolving. Modern applications of experimental economics require the integration of know-how from disciplines including economics, computer science, psychology and neuroscience. The use of computer technology enhances researchers' ability to generate and analyze large amounts of data, allowing them to use non-standard methods of data logging for experiments such as cognitive neuronal methods. Experiments are currently being conducted with software that, on the one hand, provides interaction with the people involved in experiments, and on the other helps to accurately record their responses. The goal of the CMEE conference and the papers presented here is to provide the scientific community with essential research on and applications of computer methods in experimental economics. Combining theories, methods and regional case studies, the book offers a valuable resource for all researchers, scholars and policymakers in the areas of experimental and behavioral economics.

The interaction between mathematicians, statisticians and econometricians working in actuarial sciences and finance is producing numerous meaningful scientific results. This volume introduces new ideas, in the form of four-page papers, presented at the international conference Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance (MAF), held at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), 4th-6th April 2018. The book covers a wide variety of subjects in actuarial science and financial fields, all discussed in the context of the cooperation between the three quantitative approaches. The topics include: actuarial models; analysis of high frequency financial data; behavioural finance; carbon and green finance; credit risk methods and models; dynamic optimization in finance; financial econometrics; forecasting of dynamical actuarial and financial phenomena; fund performance evaluation; insurance portfolio risk analysis; interest rate models; longevity risk; machine learning and soft-computing in finance; management in insurance business; models and methods for financial time series analysis, models for financial derivatives; multivariate techniques for financial markets analysis; optimization in insurance; pricing; probability in actuarial sciences, insurance and finance; real world finance; risk management; solvency analysis; sovereign risk; static and dynamic portfolio selection and management; trading systems. This book is a valuable resource for academics, PhD students, practitioners, professionals and researchers, and is also of interest to other readers with quantitative background knowledge.

This book presents selected peer-reviewed contributions from the International Work-Conference on Time Series, ITISE 2017, held in Granada, Spain, September 18-20, 2017. It discusses topics in time series analysis and forecasting, including advanced mathematical methodology, computational intelligence methods for time series, dimensionality reduction and similarity measures, econometric models, energy time series forecasting, forecasting in real problems, online learning in time series as well as high-dimensional and complex/big data time series. The series of ITISE conferences provides a forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students to discuss the latest ideas and implementations in the foundations, theory, models and applications in the field of time series analysis and forecasting. It focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing computer science, mathematics, statistics and econometrics.

This book explains and explores the growth curve model as a tool to gain insights into various research topics of interest to academics and practitioners alike. It includes studies on growth models for repeated measurement mixture experiments, and optimal designs for growth prediction in order to find an optimum design for the most efficient estimation of the parameters of the mixture models. It presents longitudinal studies conducted on the mathematical aptitude and intelligence quotient of tribal population in North Eastern states of India, and innovative statistical analysis showing that the status of tribes is improving over time. These results are supplemented by similar cross- sectional studies, and a retrospective longitudinal study of the social environment in North Eastern tribes indicating that the growth status of the social environment is improving. Child health is an important topic in developing countries, and as such the book features an overview of the growth and nutritional status of children aged 5 to 18 in India. Characterization of Extended Uniform Distribution and its applications for quality control in industrial production, and in yield data of tuber crops among others are discussed. Characterizations of distribution in terms of performance rate are also proved. There is also a contribution examining the past and present status of mangroves in Sunderban region of the Indian state of West Bengal from an ecological viewpoint using a growth curve model set-up. Lastly, it includes a chapter on a statistical study of platelet size decomposition and related growth model. Highlighting the importance of growth curve modelling as it applies to actual field data and encouraging more theoretically inclined statisticians to look into theoretical issues that need investigation, the book disseminates applications of the growth curve model to real-world problems and addresses related theoretical issues for the attention of theoreticians and practitioners.

This book treats the notion of morphisms in spatial analysis, paralleling these concepts in spatial statistics (Part I) and spatial econometrics (Part II). The principal concept is morphism (e.g., isomorphisms, homomorphisms, and allomorphisms), which is defined as a structure preserving the functional linkage between mathematical properties or operations in spatial statistics and spatial econometrics, among other disciplines. The purpose of this book is to present selected conceptions in both domains that are structurally the same, even though their labelling and the notation for their elements may differ. As the approaches presented here are applied to empirical materials in geography and economics, the book will also be of interest to scholars of regional science, quantitative geography and the geospatial sciences. It is a follow-up to the book "Non-standard Spatial Statistics and Spatial Econometrics" by the same authors, which was published by Springer in 2011.

This practical guide in Eviews is aimed at practitioners and students in business, economics, econometrics, and finance. It uses a step-by-step approach to equip readers with a toolkit that enables them to make the most of this widely used econometric analysis software. Statistical and econometrics concepts are explained visually with examples, problems, and solutions. Developed by economists, the Eviews statistical software package is used most commonly for time-series oriented econometric analysis. It allows users to quickly develop statistical relations from data and then use those relations to forecast future values of the data. The package provides convenient ways to enter or upload data series, create new series from existing ones, display and print series, carry out statistical analyses of relationships among series, and manipulate results and output. This highly hands-on resource includes more than 200 illustrative graphs and tables and tutorials throughout. Abdulkader Aljandali is Senior Lecturer at Coventry University in London. He is currently leading the Stochastic Finance Module taught as part of the Global Financial Trading MSc. His previously published work includes Exchange Rate Volatility in Emerging Markers, Quantitative Analysis, Multivariate Methods & Forecasting with IBM SPSS Statistics and Multivariate Methods and Forecasting with IBM (R) SPSS (R) Statistics. Dr Aljandali is an established member of the British Accounting and Finance Association and the Higher Education Academy. Motasam Tatahi is a specialist in the areas of Macroeconomics, Financial Economics, and Financial Econometrics at the European Business School, Regent's University London, where he serves as Principal Lecturer and Dissertation Coordinator for the MSc in Global Banking and Finance at The European Business School-London.

This book is a quarterly forecast and analysis report on the Chinese economy. It is published twice a year and presents ongoing results from the "China Quarterly Macroeconomic Model (CQMM)," a research project at the Center for Macroeconomic Research (CMR) at Xiamen University. Based on the CQMM, the research team forecasts China's major macroeconomic indicators for the next 8 quarters, including GDP growth rate, CPI, PPI, investment in fixed assets, household consumption, imports, exports, and foreign reserves. Moreover, it simulates different scenarios to study the effects of macroeconomic policy on the Chinese economy. In addition to helping readers to understand China's economic trends and policies, this book has three main goals: to help readers understand China's economic performance; to forecast the major macroeconomic indicators for the next 8 quarters; and to simulate the effectiveness of macroeconomic policy.