For one-semester courses in Introduction to Business Statistics. The gold standard in learning Microsoft Excelfor business statistics Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft (R) Excel (R), 9th Edition, Global Edition helps students develop the knowledge of Excel needed in future careers. The authors present statistics in the context of specific business fields, and now include a full chapter on business analytics. Guided by principles set forth by ASA's Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction (GAISE) reports and the authors' diverse teaching experiences, the text continues to innovate and improve the way this course is taught to students. Current data throughout gives students valuable practice analysing the types of data they will see in their professions, and the authors' friendly writing style includes tips and learning aids throughout.

This report is a partial result of the China's Quarterly Macroeconomic Model (CQMM), a project developed and maintained by the Center for Macroeconomic Research (CMR) at Xiamen University. The CMR, one of the Key Research Institutes of Humanities and Social Sciences sponsored by the Ministry of Education of China, has been focusing on China's economic forecast and macroeconomic policy analysis, and it started to develop the CQMM for purpose of short-term forecasting, policy analysis, and simulation in 2005. Based on the CQMM, the CMR and its partners hold press conferences to release forecasts for China's major macroeconomic variables. Since July, 2006, twenty-six quarterly reports on China's macroeconomic outlook have been presented and thirteen annual reports have been published. This report, the twenty-sixth quarterly report, has been presented at the Forum on China's Macroeconomic Outlook and Press Conference of CQMM on February 26, 2019. This conference was jointly held at Beijing by the CMR and the Economic Information Daily at Xinhua News Agency

Game theory has revolutionised our understanding of industrial organisation and the traditional theory of the firm. Despite these advances, industrial economists have tended to rely on a restricted set of tools from game theory, focusing on static and repeated games to analyse firm structure and behaviour. Luca Lambertini, a leading expert on the application of differential game theory to economics, argues that many dynamic phenomena in industrial organisation (such as monopoly, oligopoly, advertising, R&D races) can be better understood and analysed through the use of differential games. After illustrating the basic elements of the theory, Lambertini guides the reader through the main models, spanning from optimal control problems describing the behaviour of a monopolist through to oligopoly games in which firms' strategies include prices, quantities and investments. This approach will be of great value to students and researchers in economics and those interested in advanced applications of game theory.

The first book for a popular audience on the transformative, democratising technology of 'DeFi'.

After over a decade of Bitcoin, which has now moved beyond lore and hype into an increasingly robust star in the firmament of global assets, a new and more important question has arisen. What happens beyond Bitcoin? The answer is decentralised finance - 'DeFi'.

Tech and finance experts Steven Boykey Sidley and Simon Dingle argue that DeFi - which enables all manner of financial transactions to take place directly, person to person, without the involvement of financial institutions - will redesign the cogs and wheels in the engines of trust, and make the remarkable rise of Bitcoin look quaint by comparison. It will disrupt and displace fine and respectable companies, if not entire industries.

Sidley and Dingle explain how DeFi works, introduce the organisations and individuals that comprise the new industry, and identify the likely winners and losers in the coming revolution.

This volume of Advances in Econometrics focuses on recent developments in the use of structural econometric models in empirical economics. The papers in this volume are divided in to three broad groups. The first part looks at recent developments in the estimation of dynamic discrete choice models. This includes using new estimation methods for these models based on Euler equations, estimation using sieve approximation of high dimensional state space, the identification of Markov dynamic games with persistent unobserved state variables and developing test of monotone comparative static in models of multiple equilibria. The second part looks at recent advances in the area empirical matching models. The papers in this section look at developing estimators for matching models based on stability conditions, estimating matching surplus functions using generalized entropy functions, solving for the fixed point in the Choo-Siow matching model using a contraction mapping formulation. While the issue of incomplete, or partial identification of model parameters is touched upon in some of the foregoing chapters, two chapters focus on this issue, in the context of testing for monotone comparative statics in models with multiple equilibria, and estimation of supermodular games under the restrictions that players' strategies be rationalizable. The last group of three papers looks at empirical applications using structural econometric models. Two applications applies matching models to solve endogenous matching to the loan spread equation and to endogenize marriage in the collective model of intrahousehold allocation. Another applications looks at market power of condominium developers in the Japanese housing market in the 1990s.

This book presents the effects of integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) and economic processes in macroeconomic dynamics, finance, marketing, industrial policies, and in government economic strategy. The text explores modeling and applications in these fields and also describes, in a clear and accessible manner, the theories that guide the integration among information technology (IT), telecommunications, and the economy, while presenting examples of their applications. Current trends such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data technologies used in economics are also included. This volume is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students working in economic theory and the computational social sciences.

Institutions are the formal or informal 'rules of the game' that facilitate economic, social, and political interactions. These include such things as legal rules, property rights, constitutions, political structures, and norms and customs. The main theoretical insights from Austrian economics regarding private property rights and prices, entrepreneurship, and spontaneous order mechanisms play a key role in advancing institutional economics. The Austrian economics framework provides an understanding for which institutions matter for growth, how they matter, and how they emerge and can change over time. Specifically, Austrians have contributed significantly to the areas of institutional stickiness and informal institutions, self-governance and self-enforcing contracts, institutional entrepreneurship, and the political infrastructure for development.

Interest in the skew-normal and related families of distributions has grown enormously over recent years, as theory has advanced, challenges of data have grown, and computational tools have made substantial progress. This comprehensive treatment, blending theory and practice, will be the standard resource for statisticians and applied researchers. Assuming only basic knowledge of (non-measure-theoretic) probability and statistical inference, the book is accessible to the wide range of researchers who use statistical modelling techniques. Guiding readers through the main concepts and results, it covers both the probability and the statistics sides of the subject, in the univariate and multivariate settings. The theoretical development is complemented by numerous illustrations and applications to a range of fields including quantitative finance, medical statistics, environmental risk studies, and industrial and business efficiency. The author's freely available R package sn, available from CRAN, equips readers to put the methods into action with their own data.

This book discusses the need to carefully and prudently apply various regression techniques in order to obtain the full benefits. It also describes some of the techniques developed and used by the authors, presenting their innovative ideas regarding the formulation and estimation of regression decomposition models, hidden Markov chain, and the contribution of regressors in the set-theoretic approach, calorie poverty rate, and aggregate growth rate. Each of these techniques has applications that address a number of unanswered questions; for example, regression decomposition techniques reveal intra-household gender inequalities of consumption, intra-household allocation of resources and adult equivalent scales, while Hidden Markov chain models can forecast the results of future elections. Most of these procedures are presented using real-world data, and the techniques can be applied in other similar situations. Showing how difficult questions can be answered by developing simple models with simple interpretation of parameters, the book is a valuable resource for students and researchers in the field of model building.

In contrast to mainstream economics, complexity theory conceives the economy as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting agents characterised by limited information and bounded rationality. Agent Based Models (ABMs) are the analytical and computational tools developed by the proponents of this emerging methodology. Aimed at students and scholars of contemporary economics, this book includes a comprehensive toolkit for agent-based computational economics, now quickly becoming the new way to study evolving economic systems. Leading scholars in the field explain how ABMs can be applied fruitfully to many real-world economic examples and represent a great advancement over mainstream approaches. The essays discuss the methodological bases of agent-based approaches and demonstrate step-by-step how to build, simulate and analyse ABMs and how to validate their outputs empirically using the data. They also present a wide set of applications of these models to key economic topics, including the business cycle, labour markets, and economic growth.

This new and exciting book offers a fresh approach to quantitative finance and utilises novel features, including stereoscopic images which permit 3D visualisation of complex subjects without the need for additional tools. Offering an integrated approach to the subject, A First Course in Quantitative Finance introduces students to the architecture of complete financial markets before exploring the concepts and models of modern portfolio theory, derivative pricing and fixed income products in both complete and incomplete market settings. Subjects are organised throughout in a way that encourages a gradual and parallel learning process of both the economic concepts and their mathematical descriptions, framed by additional perspectives from classical utility theory, financial economics and behavioural finance. Suitable for postgraduate students studying courses in quantitative finance, financial engineering and financial econometrics as part of an economics, finance, econometric or mathematics program, this book contains all necessary theoretical and mathematical concepts and numerical methods, as well as the necessary programming code for porting algorithms onto a computer.

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.

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 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 book discusses the developments in trade theories, including new-new trade models that account for firm level trade flows, trade growth accounting using inverse gravity models (including distortions in gravity models), the impact of trade liberalization under the aegis of regional and multilateral liberalization efforts of economies using partial and general equilibrium analysis, methodologies of constructing ad valorem equivalents of non-tariff barriers, volatility spillover effects of financial and exchange rate markets. The main purpose of the book is to guide researchers working in the area of international trade, especially focused on empirical analysis of trade policy issues by updating their knowledge on issues related to trade theory, empirical methods, and their applications. The book would prove useful for policy makers, academicians, and researchers.

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 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.

This book provides an up-to-date series of advanced chapters on applied financial econometric techniques pertaining the various fields of commodities finance, mathematics & stochastics, international macroeconomics and financial econometrics. International Financial Markets: Volume I provides a key repository on the current state of knowledge, the latest debates and recent literature on international financial markets. Against the background of the "financialization of commodities" since the 2008 sub-primes crisis, section one contains recent contributions on commodity and financial markets, pushing the frontiers of applied econometrics techniques. The second section is devoted to exchange rate and current account dynamics in an environment characterized by large global imbalances. Part three examines the latest research in the field of meta-analysis in economics and finance. This book will be useful to students and researchers in applied econometrics; academics and students seeking convenient access to an unfamiliar area. It will also be of great interest established researchers seeking a single repository on the current state of knowledge, current debates and relevant literature.

Structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models are important tools for empirical work in macroeconomics, finance, and related fields. This book not only reviews the many alternative structural VAR approaches discussed in the literature, but also highlights their pros and cons in practice. It provides guidance to empirical researchers as to the most appropriate modeling choices, methods of estimating, and evaluating structural VAR models. The book traces the evolution of the structural VAR methodology and contrasts it with other common methodologies, including dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. It is intended as a bridge between the often quite technical econometric literature on structural VAR modeling and the needs of empirical researchers. The focus is not on providing the most rigorous theoretical arguments, but on enhancing the reader's understanding of the methods in question and their assumptions. Empirical examples are provided for illustration.

Structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models are important tools for empirical work in macroeconomics, finance, and related fields. This book not only reviews the many alternative structural VAR approaches discussed in the literature, but also highlights their pros and cons in practice. It provides guidance to empirical researchers as to the most appropriate modeling choices, methods of estimating, and evaluating structural VAR models. The book traces the evolution of the structural VAR methodology and contrasts it with other common methodologies, including dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. It is intended as a bridge between the often quite technical econometric literature on structural VAR modeling and the needs of empirical researchers. The focus is not on providing the most rigorous theoretical arguments, but on enhancing the reader's understanding of the methods in question and their assumptions. Empirical examples are provided for illustration.

This is the first of two volumes containing papers and commentaries presented at the Eleventh World Congress of the Econometric Society, held in Montreal, Canada in August 2015. These papers provide state-of-the-art guides to the most important recent research in economics. The book includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a wide variety of topics, covering both theory and application. These volumes provide a unique, accessible survey of progress on the discipline, written by leading specialists in their fields. The first volume includes theoretical and applied papers addressing topics such as dynamic mechanism design, agency problems, and networks.

This monograph deals with spatially dependent nonstationary time series in a way accessible to both time series econometricians wanting to understand spatial econometics, and spatial econometricians lacking a grounding in time series analysis. After charting key concepts in both time series and spatial econometrics, the book discusses how the spatial connectivity matrix can be estimated using spatial panel data instead of assuming it to be exogenously fixed. This is followed by a discussion of spatial nonstationarity in spatial cross-section data, and a full exposition of non-stationarity in both single and multi-equation contexts, including the estimation and simulation of spatial vector autoregression (VAR) models and spatial error correction (ECM) models. The book reviews the literature on panel unit root tests and panel cointegration tests for spatially independent data, and for data that are strongly spatially dependent. It provides for the first time critical values for panel unit root tests and panel cointegration tests when the spatial panel data are weakly or spatially dependent. The volume concludes with a discussion of incorporating strong and weak spatial dependence in non-stationary panel data models. All discussions are accompanied by empirical testing based on a spatial panel data of house prices in Israel.

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.

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.