This seventh volume in the series covers a variety of topics in financial planning and forecasting.

The importance of house prices to households, real estate developers, banks and policy-makers cannot be overemphasised. House price changes affect consumer spending and business investment patterns, which in turn affect the wider macro economy and the entire business cycle. Measuring and understanding house prices is therefore essential to a functioning economy, but researchers continue to disagree on the best methodological approach for constructing real estate indices. This book argues the need for more accurate house price indices, outlines the various methods used to construct indices and discusses the existing house price indices around the globe. It shows how the raw data of property transactions can be prepared for the purpose of constructing indices, discusses various applications of property price indices and empirically demonstrates how the index numbers can be used to model the supply of new houses and to estimate the price elasticity of supply. Essential reading for economists, real estate professionals and researchers, and policy-makers.

We live in a world in which financial markets have become completely decoupled from the real economy…

The world’s four largest banks now all reside in one nation: China…

Lines of code are considered more trustworthy than central banks…

In this broad-ranging, deeply researched review of modern banking and financial systems, analysts David Buckham, Robyn Wilkinson and Christiaan Straeuli unpick in parallel the ongoing erosion of trust in capitalist free markets and Western democratic institutions, and the directly related, unprecedented growth of the Chinese banking system. The former is a decades-long tale of intermittent market manipulation, inadequately regulated hubris and outright criminality, which produced the Global Financial Crisis, the most devastating financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The latter, which in various ways mirrors the conditions that led to the Crisis, may well prove worse.

In detailing the unheeded lessons of financial history, the authors reveal how the inconsistently managed tension between free markets and government regulation has led us from depression and regulation to deregulation and crisis. And with incursions into string theory, the mathematics of cryptocurrency and the intricacies of money supply, we discover what happens when an authoritarian command economy fills the moral and ideological vacuum left behind.

In a post-Covid world – in which we are witnessing booming stock markets entirely disconnected from real-world economic hardship, and communist billionaires propagating just as global inequality skyrockets – public trust in the international banking system has never been lower. This is an unprecedented survey of a fraught and complex landscape that has never been more urgent.

In The Economic Transformations in East and Central Europe the contributors argue that the area's economic history over the last century contains vital legacies that will shape its economic future. The book is an invaluable guide to understanding the current and future problems of this volatile region, and includes analysis of individual countries with comparative studies.

How we pay is so fundamental that it underpins everything – from trade to taxation, stocks and savings to salaries, pensions and pocket money. Rich or poor, criminal, communist or capitalist, we all rely on the same payments system, day in, day out. It sits between us and not just economic meltdown, but a total breakdown in law and order. Why then do we know so little about how that system really works?

Leibbrandt and de Terán shine a light on the hidden workings of the humble payment – and reveal both how our payment habits are determined by history as well as where we might go next. From national customs to warring nation states, geopolitics will shape the future of payments every bit as much as technology.

Challenging our understanding about where financial power really lies, The Pay Off shows us that the most important thing about money is the way we move it.

First published in 1980, this compact and useful book uses the earliest volumes of government-published statistics, and with the aid of computer-generated cartography, transforms the numbers there reported into an arrondissement-by-arrondissement comparative picture of French agriculture in the mid-1830s. Clout reviews problems of rapid population growth, scarcely adequate domestic food supplies and primitive systems of transportation, while attention is drawn to spatial variations in agricultural activity and productivity. Commercial, high-yielding farming was best developed in a northern multi-nuclear region, comprising of Ile-de-France, Normandy and Nord, with smaller foci of commercial orientation along an eastern axis from Alsace to Marseilles and in western areas from the Loire to the middle of the Garonne valley. Clout concludes that the revolutionary promise of national economic unity was far from being realised in the 1830s and was not to be achieved until national systems of transport and education were firmly established later in the nineteenth century.

This title was first published in 2000: Sustainable development offers visions of the future, but implementation of new sustainable policies seems slow. This text presents a forecasting method directed to overcome some barriers to the implementation of more sustainable economic policy. Using a case study, the authors describe how economic and environmental forecasts can be developed that are relevant to the immediate concerns of policy-makers and are more likely to lead to policy changes. A combination of forecasting methods are shown to evaluate a range of current alternatives in the future. Similar techniques have been used in developing countries, but here the techniques are applied to an already industrialized economy.

This analysis of macroeconomic policy, originally published in 1989, argues that key government objectives, such as reduced inflation, decreased unemployment and an adequate level of national saving can be achieved only by employing both monetary and fiscal policies, in conjunction with supply-side policies expressly designed to improve the workings of the labour market. Part 1 is a comparative analysis showing the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on the economy. Real-wage rigidity in the labour market is shown to have important consequences for the working of both types of policy, because it conditions the economy's response to tax changes. Part 2 presents an econometric model which combines consistent stock-flow accounts with a full range of expectational effects. Part 3 presents an innovative technique for solving rational expectations models with the need for arbitary terminal conditions.

The field of behavioural economics can tell us a great deal about cognitive bias and unconscious decision-making, challenging the orthodox economic model whereby consumers make rational and informed choices. But it is in the arena of health that it perhaps offers individuals and governments the most value. In this important new book, the most pernicious health issues we face today are examined through a behavioral economic lens. It provides an essential and timely overview of how this growing field of study can reframe and offer solutions to some of the biggest health issues of our age. The book opens with an overview of the core theoretical concepts, after which each chapter assesses how behavioral economic research and practice can inform public policy across a range of health issues. Including chapters on tobacco, alcohol and drug use, physical activity, dietary intake, cancer screening and sexual health, the book integrates the key insights from the field to both developed and developing nations. Also asking important ethical questions around paternalism and informed choice, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers across psychology, economics and business and management, as well as public health professionals wishing for a concise overview of the role behavioral economics can potentially play in allowing people to live healthier lives.

Discussing economic theory and English economic history from the eighteenth century until the late 1970s this volume discusses among other things fixed capital and problems with the definition of the premodern economy as well as providing a chronology of 18th century business cycles.

In his long-awaited and provocative book, George Friedman turns his eye on the future-offering a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century. The Next 100 Years draws on a fascinating exploration of history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years. Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era-with changes in store.

This book provides information on a statistical account and theoretical interpretation of Swedish business cycles since 1918 as well as a survey of the problems of economic policy, as revealed both in practice and in theoretical discussion, during the inter-war and post-war periods.

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe. The debate is one of the biggest in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hangs on the answer. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo transforms the debate with a powerful new framework in which rationality and irrationality coexist-the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency is incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought-a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions about economics and investing, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how markets really work.

This book, first published in 1992, examines the subject of foreign exchange market efficiency and, in particular, the effectiveness of central bank intervention in the market. This book is ideal for students of economics.

At the time in which this book was first published in 1987, mass unemployment had emerged as the dominant, most visible, problem of the West European economies. In this challenging discussion of ways to overcome unemployment Ciaran Driver stresses the importance of managed restructuring. This book is ideal for students of business and economics.

Energy price rises have been amongst the biggest change that has taken place in our society over the last few decades. Their impact, particularly when this book was first published in 1983, had a growing importance in social policy, practice and research, and fuel was, and still is, a major public issue. This collection of essays describes how any why domestic fuel prices have been rising faster than other prices and incomes, what impacts this has on domestic budgets, and the extent of 'fuel poverty'. The resulting problems of debts, disconnections, cold conditions and hypothermia are discussed by specialists in these fields. This book is ideal for students of economics and social policy.

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.

Best-selling books such as Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist have paved the way for the flourishing economics-made-fun genre. While books like these present economics as a strong and explanatory science, the ongoing economic crisis has exposed the shortcomings of economics to the general public. In the face of this crisis, many people, including well-known economists such as Paul Krugman, have started to express their doubts about whether economics is a success as a science. As well as academic papers, newspaper columns with a large audience have discussed the failure of economic to predict and explain ongoing trends. The emerging picture is somewhat confusing: economics-made-fun books present economics as a method of thinking that can successfully explain everyday and "freaky" phenomena. On the other hand, however, economics seems to fail in addressing and explaining the most pressing matters related to the field of economics itself. This book explores the confusion created by this contradictory picture of economics. Could a science that cannot answer its own core questions really be used to explain the logic of everyday life? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.

This report, first published in 1977, explores several different approaches to the same question; namely, how severe will be the impact on key U.S. macro-economic variables of the transition from main reliance on oil and natural gas to other sources of energy? This book will be of interest to students of economics and environmental studies.

Originally published between 1925 and 1997 the volumes in this set: Discuss the Impacts of Profitability, Business Cycles and the Capital Stock on Productivity; Evaluate various approaches to managing the uncertainty inherent in the future course of the interest rate cycle; Examine the combined effect of financial instability and industrial restructuring on postwar economic growth and recession in the US; Determine what statistical and other information is needed to formulate both the objects and the means of government economic policy; Ask what theoretical tools should be used in order to clarify the issues of economic policy; Examine the sociological aspects of the business cycle.

How can we effectively aggregate disparate pieces of information that are spread among many different individuals? In other words, how does one best access the 'wisdom of the crowd'? Prediction markets, which are essentially speculative markets created for the purpose of aggregating information and making predictions, offer the answer to this question. The effective use of these markets has the potential not only to help forecast future events on a national and international level, but also to assist companies in providing, for example, improved estimates of the potential market size for a new product idea or the launch date of new products and services. The markets have already been used to forecast uncertain outcomes ranging from influenza outbreaks to the spread of other infectious diseases, to the demand for hospital services, to the box office success of movies, climate change, vote shares and election outcomes, to the probability of meeting project deadlines. The insights gained also have many potentially valuable applications for public policy more generally. These markets offer substantial promise as a tool of information aggregation as well as forecasting, whether alone or as a supplement to other mechanisms like surveys, group deliberations, and expert opinion. Moreover, they can be applied at a macroeconomic and microeconomic level to yield information that is valuable for government and commercial policy-makers and which can be used for a number of social purposes. This volume of original readings, contributed by many of the leading experts in the field, marks a significant addition to the base of knowledge about this fascinating subject area. The book should appeal to all those with an interest in economics, forecasting or public policy, and in particular those with an interest in the study of money, investment and risk.

This title, first published in 1979, presents the Ph.D. thesis of the world-renowned economist and financial expert, Willem Buiter. In Part I, three alternative specifications of temporary equilibria in asset markets, including their implications for macroeconomic models, are discussed; Part II examines the long-term implications of some short-term macroeconomic models. The analysis of the theoretical foundations of 'direct crowding out' and 'indirect crowding out' is particularly prominent, with the result that a synthesis of short-term macroeconomic analysis and long-term growth theory is formulated. The traditional tools of comparative dynamics and stability analysis are employed frequently. However, it is also argued that the true scope of government policy can only be adequately evaluated with the aid of concepts such as dynamic and static controllability. Temporary Equilibrium and Long-Run Equilibrium is a valuable study, and relevant for all serious students of modern economic theory.

Computational intelligence, a sub-branch of artificial intelligence, is a field which draws on the natural world and adaptive mechanisms in order to study behaviour in changing complex environments. This book provides an interdisciplinary view of current technological advances and challenges concerning the application of computational intelligence techniques to financial time-series forecasting, trading and investment. The book is divided into five parts. The first part introduces the most important computational intelligence and financial trading concepts, while also presenting the most important methodologies from these different domains. The second part is devoted to the application of traditional computational intelligence techniques to the fields of financial forecasting and trading, and the third part explores the applications of artificial neural networks in these domains. The fourth part delves into novel evolutionary-based hybrid methodologies for trading and portfolio management, while the fifth part presents the applications of advanced computational intelligence modelling techniques in financial forecasting and trading. This volume will be useful for graduate and postgraduate students of finance, computational finance, financial engineering and computer science. Practitioners, traders and financial analysts will also benefit from this book.

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe--and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest. This is one of the biggest debates in economics and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo cuts through this debate with a new framework, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, in which rationality and irrationality coexist. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency isn't wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought--a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. A fascinating intellectual journey filled with compelling stories, Adaptive Markets starts with the origins of market efficiency and its failures, turns to the foundations of investor behavior, and concludes with practical implications--including how hedge funds have become the Galapagos Islands of finance, what really happened in the 2008 meltdown, and how we might avoid future crises. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions in economics, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how markets really work.