Both in insurance and in finance applications, questions involving extremal events (such as large insurance claims, large fluctuations in financial data, stock market shocks, risk management, ...) play an increasingly important role. This book sets out to bridge the gap between the existing theory and practical applications both from a probabilistic as well as from a statistical point of view. Whatever new theory is presented is always motivated by relevant real-life examples. The numerous illustrations and examples, and the extensive bibliography make this book an ideal reference text for students, teachers and users in the industry of extremal event methodology.

No one can deny the obvious link between statistics and sports, and many a sports fan can reel off a lengthy list of statistics about a favorite team or player. The anthology "A Sports-Oriented Approach to Introductory Statistics" cleverly combines the study of statistics with the high interest area of sports to create a text that delivers an engaging and effective introduction to statistical principles.
The first several chapters of the book are the statistical and mathematical offensive linemen, often overlooked and under-appreciated, but necessary for gaining a firm understanding of theory and statistics. This prepares students for the principles covered in subsequent chapters.
These later chapters are the skill players of the text, and through them students learn things like how to predict points in the NHL, determine if there is a home field advantage in football, and compare MLB teams to find out if statistically any one team has been the worst over the past ten years.
Each example in the book uses real data from the sports world. The central limit theorem is explained by examining salary data from major league baseball. Understanding probability distribution of a discrete random variable is illustrated through the number of goals scored in the World Cup. Regression analysis is explored through evaluating team performance.
Each chapter of the text includes examples, accompanied by complete, step-by-step solutions. All problems require students to produce extended, well-thought-out answers using the target principles. Symbols and formulas used within chapters are organized at the end of the chapters for easy reference.
This unique approach increases student interest, and delivers important content in a relatable, likeable format. "A Sports-Oriented Approach to Introductory Statistics" is written for courses in elementary, undergraduate statistics, and is an ideal supplement to standard required texts. The text can also be used as a supplemental text in many math and business courses grounded in statistics.
Andrew Wiesner earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently he is a Lecturer of Statistics at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Wiesner has been teaching statistics for more than ten years. He successfully combined his passion for education with a life-long love of sports, and supervised several undergraduate Honors theses in which students analyze sports data.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Didactics, Economic Pedagogy, grade: 1,7, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (Fakultat fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften), course: Cross Cultural Competence, language: English, abstract: Presentations are ways of communicating ideas and information to a group. Presentation skills and public speaking skills are very useful in many aspects of work and life, may they be in business, sales and selling, training, teaching, lecturing and generally entertaining an audience. Developing the confidence and capability to give good presentations, and to stand up in front of an audience and speak well, are also extremely helpful competencies for self development. Even if the formats and purposes of presentations vary significantly, for example: oral (spoken), multimedia (using various media, visuals, audio, etc), PowerPoint presentations, short impromptu presentations, long planned presentations, educational or training sessions, lectures, or simply giving a talk on a subject to a group on a voluntary basis for pleasure, all successful presentations will generally use the essential techniques and structures explained here. Aside from presentation, technique, confidence, experience and preparation are key factors. This paper will give you a good overview of key presentation and public speaking elements, aspects to consider while preparing and useful pointers for the final delivery. In the second part I will touch on the subject of speaking to an international audience while the final segment will touch on the importance of presentation and public speaking skills in today's business world.

2012 Reprint of 1925 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Irving Fisher was an American economist, inventor, and social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the Post-Keynesian school. As a student, Fisher had shown particular talent and inclination for mathematics, but he found that economics offered greater scope for his ambition and social concerns. His thesis, published by Yale in 1892 as "Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices," was a rigorous development of the theory of general equilibrium. When he began writing the thesis, Fisher had not been aware that Leon Walras and his continental European disciples had already covered similar ground. Nonetheless, Fisher's work was a very significant contribution and was immediately recognized and praised as first-rate by such European masters as Francis Edgeworth. Contains an preface written by Fisher for the 1925 edition published by Yale.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2010 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: Cum Laude, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: The overall objective of this study is to examine the potential of introducing renewable biomass for a decentralized household energy provision in rural areas at the Kenyan South Coast. The main question posed in this research is whether the renewable products of an oil tree and related energy end-use appliances could potentially be a cheap, widely available and socially accepted substitute for kerosene and traditional biomass. The research data and results are based on a UNDP GEF SGP funded pilot project. The project was conceptualized by the author and implemented with local communities with support from the German Development Service (DED), the World Wide Fund (WWF) and various government institutions in Kwale District between 2006 and 2010. The first theoretical part of this study describes the negative socio-economic, environmental and health related impacts of the current household energy provision and energy use in Developing Countries (DCs). It becomes obvious that the households' strong dependency on kerosene and traditional biomass severely hampers the achievement of national and international development goals. The potentials and barriers when introducing renewable energy technologies (RETs) in DCs are presented by using selected project examples. The discussion emphasizes that not only economical, institutional and infrastructural factors contribute to the low dissemination rates of RETs in DCs but also the social acceptance by potential users. Finally the results from this investigation are used to discuss the current and future household energy provision in Kenya. The second part of the study elaborates on the possibility of sustainably introducing the oil tree Jatropha curcas L. as a bioenergy source to rural households. For that purpose the feasibility of introducing t

Many years of teaching led Geoff Renshaw to develop Maths for Economics as a resource which builds your self-confidence in maths by using a gradual learning gradient and constantly reinforcing learning with examples and exercises. Some students embarking on this module feel that they have lost their confidence in maths, or perhaps never had any in the first place. The author has designed the book so that whether you have a maths A level, GCSE, or perhaps feel that you need to go back over the very basics, knowledge is built up in small steps, not big jumps. Once you are confident that you have firmly grasped the foundations, this book will help you to make the progression beyond the mechanical exercises and into the development of a maths tool-kit for the analysis of economic and business problems. This is a skill which will prove valuable for your degree and for your future employers. The online resource centre contains the following resources: For Students: Ask the author forum Excel tutorial Maple tutorial Further exercises Answers to further questions Expanded solutions to progress exercises For Lecturers (password protected): Test exercises Graphs from the book Answers to test exercises PowerPoint presentations Instructor manual

2011 Reprint of the 1933 edition. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, Fisher developed a theory of economic crises called "debt-deflation," which rejected general equilibrium theory and attributed crises to the bursting of a credit bubble. According to the debt deflation theory, a sequence of effects of the debt bubble bursting occurs: 1. Debt liquidation and distress selling. 2. Contraction of the money supply as bank loans are paid off. 3. A fall in the level of asset prices. 4. A still greater fall in the net worth of businesses, precipitating bankruptcies. 5. A fall in profits. 6. A reduction in output, in trade and in employment. 7. Pessimism and loss of confidence. 8. Hoarding of money. 9. A fall in nominal interest rates and a rise in deflation adjusted interest rates. This theory was ignored in favor of Keynesian economics, partly due to the damage to Fisher's reputation from his overly optimistic attitude prior to the crash, but has experienced a revival of mainstream interest since the 1980s, particularly since the Late-2000s recession, and is now a main theory with which he is popularly associated.

2011 Reprint of 1920 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. According to Paul Volcker, The Economic Consequences of Peace marked the entrance into the world scene of the twentieth century's most influential economist. It should be in the library of every serious student of world affairs. Keynes attended the Versailles Conference as a delegate of the British Treasury and argued for a much more generous peace. The book was a best seller throughout the world and was critical in establishing a general opinion that the Versailles Treaty was a vindictive and counter-productive peace settlement. The book also helped to consolidate American public opinion against the treaty and against involvement in the League of Nations. The perception by much of the British public that Germany had been treated unfairly in turn was a crucial factor in public support for appeasement. The success of the book established Keynes' reputation as a leading economist especially on the left. When Keynes was a key player in establishing the Bretton Woods system in 1944, he remembered the lessons from Versailles as well as the Great Depression. The Marshall Plan after Second World War is a similar system to that proposed by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

2010 Reprint of 1920 Edition. According to Paul Volcker, The Economic Consequences of Peace marked the entrance into the world scene of the twentieth century's most influential economist. It should be in the library of every serious student of world affairs. Keynes attended the Versailles Conference as a delegate of the British Treasury and argued for a much more generous peace. The book was a best seller throughout the world and was critical in establishing a general opinion that the Versailles Treaty was a vindictive and counter-productive peace settlement. The book also helped to consolidate American public opinion against the treaty and against involvement in the League of Nations. The perception by much of the British public that Germany had been treated unfairly in turn was a crucial factor in public support for appeasement. The success of the book established Keynes' reputation as a leading economist especially on the left. When Keynes was a key player in establishing the Bretton Woods system in 1944, he remembered the lessons from Versailles as well as the Great Depression. The Marshall Plan after Second World War is a similar system to that proposed by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

"Extreme, synchronized rises and falls in financial markets occur infrequently but they do occur. The problem with the models is that they did not assign a high enough chance of occurrence to the scenario in which many things go wrong at the same time - the 'em perfect storm' scenario" (Business Week, September 1998). This book focuses on limiting theorems for copulae. Because joint dependences of extremal events is nowadays is key issue in risk management, it becomes crucial to get a better understanding of behavior of copulas in tails. The first chapter presents a survey on copulae, and possible applications in risk management. The following chapters present some canonical theorems for copulae, and the link between this approach and standard results on multivariate extreme is explained. A concluding chapter presents a survey on graphical procedures to represent copula densities (with proper fit) in tails.

Demographics is a vital field of study for understanding social and economic change and it has attracted attention in recent years as concerns have grown over the aging populations of developed nations. Demographic studies help make sense of key aspects of the economy, offering insight into trends in fertility, mortality, immigration, and labor force participation, as well as age, gender, and race specific trends in health and disability.
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Demography and the Economy" explores the connections between demography and economics, paying special attention to what demographic trends can reveal about the sustainability of traditional social security programs and the larger implications for economic growth. The volume brings together some of the leading scholars working at the border between the two disciplines, and it provides an eclectic overview of both fields. Contributors also offer deeper analysis of a variety of issues such as the impact of greater wealth on choices about marriage and childbearing and the effects of aging populations on housing prices, Social Security, and Medicare.

This dissertation will discuss the uncertainty encountered in the daily operations of businesses. The concepts will be developed by first giving an overview of probability and statistics as used in our everyday activities, such as the basic principles of probability, univariate and multivariate statistics, data clustering and mapping, as well as time sequence and spectral analysis. The examples used will be from the oil and gas exploration industry because the risks taken in this industry are normally quite large and are ideal for showing the application of the various techniques for minimizing risk. Subsequently, the discussion will deal with basic risk analysis, spatial and time variations of risk, geotechnical risk analysis, risk aversion and how it is affected by personal biases, and how to use portfolios to hedge risk together with the application of real options. Next, fractal analysis and its application to economics and risk analysis will be examined, followed by some examples showing the change in the Value at Risk under Fractal Brownian Motions. Finally, a neural network application is shown whereby some of these risks and risk factors will be combined to forecast the best possible outcome given a certain knowledge base. The chapters will discuss: Basic probability techniques and uncertainty principles Analysis and diversification for exploration projects The value and risk of information in the decision process Simulation techniques and modeling of uncertainty Project valuation and project risk return Modeling risk propensity or preference analysis of exploration projects Application of fractals to risk analysis Simultaneous prediction of strategic risk and decision attributes using multivariate statistics and neural networks

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Economics - Statistics and Methods, grade: 1.00, University of Hamburg, course: Programm: MIBA, 33 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: Why was an index like the Human Development Index (HDI) established in the first place? That question and what the HDI really is about is the topic of this paper. The aim is to highlight its uniqueness and show how it differentiates from other measurement tools of human development. This assignment was done with secondary research only. For a topic that young there are efficient internet sources available which were sufficient enough to complete the assignment based on the oral presentation., abstract: Why was an index like the Human Development Index (HDI) established in the first place? That question and what the HDI really is about is the topic of this paper. The aim is to highlight its uniqueness and show how it differentiates from other measurement tools of human development. This assignment was done with secondary research only. For a topic that young there are efficient internet sources available which were sufficient enough to complete the assignment based on the oral presentation.

Copulas provide us with a tool for constructing multivariate distributions with arbitrary marginal distributions and a wide range of dependence structures. The aim of this book is to describe what the practitioner, or scientist, needs to know about copulas. Although the emphasis is on financial applications, the general theory is relevant for any multivariate setting. The outline of the book is as follows. Chapter 2 is a discussion of multivariate distribution functions that are useful for financial data. In chapter 3 we proceed with a discussion of commonly used dependence measures, and we highlight deficiencies of the correlation coefficient. We start chapter 4 by describing the properties a general function must satisfy in order to be a copula, and goes on by describing the properties of the most common copulas. In chapter 5 we discuss the problem of estimating the parameters in a copula, and in chapter 6 we review the recent goodness-of-fit procedures suggested in the literature. Chapter 7 is a short review of some of the main applications of copulas in relation to credit risk models.

200 socio and macro-economic indicators, more than 600 tables, over 200 full-colour charts. Exciting and engaging presentation. Hundreds of illustrations. Tons of rigourous analyses. Insightful and pithy running commentary. Overall, an entirely absorbing and engaging volume. And quite possibly the most comprehensive comparative study yet done of Sub-Saharan Africa economies. This manual is an exhaustive macro-economic survey of all 48 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, as they performed during the 10 years leading to 2009/2010. It presents an in-depth portrait of their investment, economic, and business climates, through hundreds of extensive analyses. Data is gathered from a dozen veritable multilateral agencies including the World Bank, IMF, UNCTAD, UNICEF and the WTO. The 48 countries are ranked at several turns for hundreds of different economic properties and outcomes. Then there is an overall ranking conclusion in the final chapter. Thus, a climactic outcome of this exploration is the emergence of a yearly index (Dba Index, Ratings & Ranking) which, for the first time, engages Africa's economies across the entire spectrum of social, economic and business activity. The exploration delves deeper for West Africa, placing its 16 countries in comparative league tables of performance during contiguous four-year phases leading up to 2009-2010, and also for projections into the future, where possible. A lively running commentary threads through every chapter, picking up salient points and inferences. It tells its many stories from the perspective of West Africa's largest economy - Nigeria. Doing Business in West Africa will prove useful for businesses, multinational corporations, governments, diplomatic missions, development agencies, educational and research institutions; any organisation with significant interests and functions in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will be published in the first quarter of every year, with updated and re-analysed data.

This is a college textbook for the introductory statistics course primarily for business and economics students. The content includes descriptive statistics, probability, hypothesis testing, regression analysis, time series analysis, and statistical process control. The book incorporates many real-world examples and demonstrates statistical analysis using Microsoft Excel 2007.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Didactics, Economic Pedagogy, grade: 1,0, Berlin School of Economics, 96 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The purpose of the present thesis is to examine if and to which extent cultures converge in an international business environment and if intercultural competence has a bearing on it. Therefore, theoretical and practical insights in the subject of culture, its implicit and explicit differences, as well as its measurements will be provided. Due to the fact that communication - as a major cultural attribute - is the most obvious level on which cultural differences are recognized, insights in the topic of cross-cultural and intercultural communication will be given. A thorough discussion of the concept of culture and communication is beyond the scope of this paper, but in what follows, an adequate overview of recognized and well-known researchers' theories and findings will be provided. Besides giving theoretical background knowledge, it will be examined whether the internationally defined soft skills of intercultural competence can be seen as an approach towards a universal interculture, likewise a universal communication. The topic of the present thesis will be illustrated by a case study, as well as researched and evaluated by a field study conducted at one of the most culturally diverse organization - the United Nations. Findings should only expose tendencies to confirm or disprove previous research findings in the field of cross-cultural comparative research and intercultural communication. It is not intended to present new empirical findings.

Master's Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics - Didactics, Economic Pedagogy, grade: 1,3, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), 82 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This study does not focus on the "powerhouses" of internationalisation but rather at the possibilities of an "average" university with up to now rather average numbers of foreign students and an average degree of overall internationalisation. The University of Bielefeld is taken as one example, of how internationalisation can be implemented, what the key processes of internationalisation are and which steps should be taken to foster internationalisation in the future. The first part of this study is having a look at what internationalisation of universities is and how the idea has developed historically. he paper then in the second part describes the main stakeholders and their role in the internationalisation of higher education. In part three and four the key drivers of internationalisation for universities in general and German institutions of higher education in particular are identified. Therefore this paper outlines first the general global trends in higher education in part three and than focuses on specific German and European developments in part four. Special attention will be drawn on the legal changes in the German system of higher education and the EU-harmonisation process. In Chapter five the competitive forces like new market entrants and substitutes will be looked at. The sixth part will describe the specific motivation for internationalisation at the UoB and sketch the environmental situation of the university like the history of the institution, geographical aspects, its profile etc. It then focuses on strategy formulated so far. Parts seven and eight examine the internationalisation efforts on the side of resource allocation and international programmes. The last chapter tries to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the inte