The remarkable evolution of econophysics research has brought the deep synthesis of ideas derived from economics and physicsto subjects as diverse as education, banking, finance, and the administration of large institutions. The original papers in this collection present a broad summary of these advances, written by interdisciplinary specialists. Included are studies on subjects in the development of econophysics; on the perspectives offered by econophysics on large problems in economics and finance, including the 2008-9 financial crisis; and on higher education and group decision making. The introductions and insights they provide will benefit everyone interested in applications of this new transdisciplinary science.
Ten papers present an updated version of the origins, issues, and applications of econophysics Economics and finance chapters consider lessons learned from the 2008-9 financial crisis Sociophysics chapters propose new thinking on educational reforms and group decision making"

This book offers new insights and perspectives on the financial and banking sector in Europe with a special focus on Central and Southeastern European countries. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of primary sources and datasets, the book examines both the financial development and performance of the real sector of the economy and the impact and involvement of the banking sector. The contributions offer new insights into current financial innovations and discuss best practices in innovative financial solutions. They also highlight new perspectives in finance and analyze characteristic problems in the real and banking sectors in various European countries. The insights and financial solutions presented in this book will be of interest to scholars of finance and financial economics as well as practitioners in the financial industry and policy makers.

The valuation of the liability structure can be determined by real options because the shares of a company can be regarded as similar to the purchase of a financial call option. Therefore, from this perspective, debt can be viewed as the sale of a financial put option. As a result, financial analysts are able to establish different valuations of a company, according to these two financing methods. Valuation of the Liability Structure by Real Options explains how the real options method works in conjunction with traditional methods. This innovative approach is particularly suited to the valuation of companies in industries where an underlying asset has high volatility (such as the mining or oil industries) or where research and development costs are high (for example, the pharmaceutical industry). Integration of the economic value of net debt (rather than the accounting value) and integration of the asset volatility are the main advantages of this approach.

The World Bank remains one of the most prominent actors in the field of global development, and one of the foremost international organisations in contemporary global politics. Over its history, its lending for housing has developed by prioritising financial sector expansion over the needs of low-income groups. Through this book, Liam Clegg explores the factors influencing change in the World Bank's operational practices, and the contribution of these operations to state transformations across the global South. The author outlines three main operational phases, in which the Bank prioritised: improving informal settlements, strengthening governments' housing finance programs, and expanding mortgage markets. Constrained experimentalism is identified as the driver of this changing focus, with trial and error-based learning interacting with personnel shifts and borrowers' reform trajectories to shape outcomes. In addition to reviewing relevant institutional dynamics at the World Bank, particular attention is paid to the impact of projects on housing system transformations in Mexico, China, and Tanzania. Overall, the declining focus on the housing needs of lower-income populations leads Clegg to label World Bank lending in this area as an exercise in mortgaging development. This valuable study of the field will be an important resource for researchers, postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students from across the fields of political science and international studies.

This book on Applied Operations Research and Financial Modelling in Energy (AORFME) presents several applications of operations research (OR) and financial modelling. The contributions by a group of OR and Finance researchers focus on a variety of energy decisions, presenting a quantitative perspective, and providing policy implications of the proposed or applied methodologies. The content is divided into three main parts: Applied OR I: Optimization Approaches, Applied OR II: Forecasting Approaches and Financial Modelling: Impacts of Energy Policies and Developments in Energy Markets. The book appeals to scholars in economics, finance and operations research, and to practitioners working in the energy sector. This is the eighth volume in a series of books on energy organized by the Centre for Energy and Value Issues (CEVI). For this volume, CEVI collaborated with Hacettepe University's Energy Markets Research and Application Center. The previous volumes in the series are: Financial Aspects in Energy (2011), Energy Economics and Financial Markets (2012), Perspectives on Energy Risk (2014), Energy Technology and Valuation Issues (2015), Energy and Finance (2016), Energy Economy, Finance and Geostrategy (2018), and Financial Implications of Regulations in the Energy Industry (2020).

Foundations of finance in 6 laminated pages for business students and professionals alike. Quick access to the essentials provides an opportunity for review throughout an entire course, daily, weekly or before exams. Review often, after a lecture or textbook chapter to step back and see how that knowledge fits into the big picture. Also a great reference tool for any non-finance related business professionals to understand what keeps the company running and profitable. Suggested uses: Students -- with the least expensive study tool you will find - review, review, review -- and your scores will increase; Professors -- use this guide as a finance course syllabus to offer more to your students at a price that beats any supplemental material; Business -- handy overview of the important aspects of finance for yourself or employees to better understand the business.

This book proposes a new capital asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM that outperforms other popular models in empirical tests using US stock returns. The ZCAPM is derived from Fischer Black's well-known zero-beta CAPM, itself a more general form of the famous capital asset pricing model (CAPM) by 1990 Nobel Laureate William Sharpe and others. It is widely accepted that the CAPM has failed in its theoretical relation between market beta risk and average stock returns, as numerous studies have shown that it does not work in the real world with empirical stock return data. The upshot of the CAPM's failure is that many new factors have been proposed by researchers. However, the number of factors proposed by authors has steadily increased into the hundreds over the past three decades. This new ZCAPM is a path-breaking asset pricing model that is shown to outperform popular models currently in practice in finance across different test assets and time periods. Since asset pricing is central to the field of finance, it can be broadly employed across many areas, including investment analysis, cost of equity analyses, valuation, corporate decision making, pension portfolio management, etc. The ZCAPM represents a revolution in finance that proves the CAPM as conceived by Sharpe and others is alive and well in a new form, and will certainly be of interest to academics, researchers, students, and professionals of finance, investing, and economics.

The pursuit of the financial proceeds of criminal activity has become a central theme of contemporary crime control. Initially conceived to tackle the global trade in illegal drugs, these methods have been more recently employed in the context of terrorism. This work offers a judicious account of the national and international strategies which seek to cope with crime by attacking its financial underpinnings. The book focuses on the increasingly civil legal orientation of these strategies - a sea change from criminal prosecutions to civil legal instruments. The author focuses on developments of the civil strategy in the US and the UK beginning with its historical origins. The work reveals the contradictions that animate the civil approach to criminal finance and discloses the failure of civil devices, as presently constituted, to comply with rights. It bridges the gap between two jurisdictions prominent in this area; the United States and the United Kingdom. This comparative element distinguishes the project from other work in the field that focuses on a single jurisdiction. Critical in its perspective, the work brings balance and reflection to an emergent area of national and international interest. Money Laundering and the Proceeds of Crime analyzes rather than merely describes the proceeds of crime laws, anti-money laundering regimes and the civil legal approach to criminal finance and as such will have a wide readership. The book will appeal to, amongst others, government actors involved in constructing instruments to confront criminal finance, scholars and researchers working in the area and banks, financial institutions, lawyers and other professional private actors charged with anti-money laundering functions.

'While market activity and political activity are often analyzed independently of each other, Wagner demonstrates their interdependence. His novel analysis shows that politics has a level of complexity well beyond the way it is typically depicted in the social sciences, and shows that political activity has more in common with market activity than is commonly recognized. The book offers a wide range of insights and pushes readers to take a more nuanced view of politics.' - Randall G. Holcombe, Florida State University, US Economists typically treat government as something outside the business realm, a sort of 'Lord of the Manor'. Richard Wagner argues that this is the wrong approach and can ultimately be destructive to capitalism and to society. Modern governments are a peculiar form of business enterprise. They face the same problems as regular businesses, such as ascertaining demand and organizing production, and act within the system in a way that can lead to a parasitical relationship with the market. Largely rooted in political economy, this book develops new theoretical ideas and formulations to explain why democracy is a difficult form of government to maintain. The author explores how and why limited governments can morph into a system of destructive politics, and looks at ways to escape this process. This dynamic book will be useful for public choice scholars, economists, political scientists, and lawyers who are interested in political economy in its various guises.

This open access book provides a readable narrative of the bubbles and the banking crisis Japan experienced during the two decades between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Japan, which was a leading competitor in the world's manufacturing sector, tried to transform itself into an economy with domestic demand-led mature growth, but the ensuing bubbles and crisis instead made the country suffer from chronicle deflation and stagnation. The book analyses why the Japanese authorities could not avoid making choices that led to this outcome. The chapters are based on the lectures to regulators from emerging economies delivered at the Global Financial Partnership Center of the Financial Services Agency of Japan.

Sovereign Investment: Concerns and Policy Reactions provides the first major holistic examination and interdisciplinary analysis of sovereign wealth funds. Sovereign wealth funds currently hold three trillion dollars' worth of investments, almost twice the amount in all the hedge funds worldwide, and are predicted to hold nine trillion more by 2015.
This relatively new and rapidly expanding phenomenon remains relatively unregulated, but the International Monetary Fund and the G7 aim to establish temporary and voluntary rules to introduce transparency and uniformity until more permanent regulatory structures are instituted. What permanent rules and procedures should govern sovereign wealth funds? What bodies should enforce them? Do the current provisional rules answer the national security concerns of host countries? Editors Karl P. Sauvant, Lisa Sachs, and Wouter P.F. Schmit Jongbloed address these questions in a collection of essays by leading authorities from the IMF, academic institutions, law firms, multi-national corporations, and think tanks. Together, these authors analyze how sovereign wealth funds have helped to limit the effects of the current global economic crisis, and what rules can govern their operation in the future.

The effective delivery of healthcare services is vital to the general welfare and well-being of a country's citizens. Financial infrastructure and policy reform can play a significant role in optimizing existing healthcare programs. Health Economics and Healthcare Reform: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a comprehensive source of academic material on the importance of economic structures and policy reform initiatives in modern healthcare systems. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as clinical costing, patient engagement, and e-health, this book is ideally designed for medical practitioners, researchers, professionals, and students interested in the optimization of healthcare delivery.

"National finance" is a new concept launched by the author in his book National Finance A Chinese Perspective, a unique monograph that differs from other financial publications dealing with general topics in public finance. The monograph intends to provide a full, well-developed and macro-level exposition of all major aspects of finance from the perspective of the central government, with focus laid on the most essential, immediate and intricate issues in national financial development, which are the "hard nuts" that have to be cracked on both central and regional levels and on the fronts of both offshore and onshore finance. It attempts to cope with a series of formidable challenges that a country, particularly its top government officials, must take in developing finance: how national finance should develop and overtake in the face of rising financial industries, how it should respond to the influx of AI+blockchain technologies, how a country guards against and copes with systematic or regional financial risks with security, fluidity and profitability serving as its cornerstones, how it can build up and promote the new international financial system and governance amid international financial powers around the world, and so on.

Now in its third incarnation, this widely acclaimed and popular text has again been fully updated and revised by the author. There is a bewildering array of models to explain the volatility of exchange rates since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. It is therefore invaluable that Hans Visser is able to bring method to this 'model madness' by grouping the various theories according to the time period for which their explanation is relevant, and further subdividing them according to their assumptions as to price flexibility and international financial asset substitutability. A Guide to International Monetary Economics is a systematic overview of exchange rate theories, an analysis of exchange rate systems and a discussion of exchange rate policies including discussion of the obstacles that may confront policymakers while running any particular system. This third edition emphasises recent developments such as the creation and expansion of the euro and the radical solution of dollarisation. The book is a concise treatment of this complex field and does not encumber the reader with a surfeit of potentially distracting institutional details. As with previous editions, the emphasis is on the economic reasoning behind the formulae while introducing students to the mathematics that will enable them to pursue further reading. This book is aimed at postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in general and international economics and international finance, as well as business management scholars and researchers specialising in finance. Professional economists wishing to bring up to date their knowledge of the subject will also find much within this book of value to them.

Are public banks a better alternative to private banks? Do they provide sufficient finance for development? Do they serve as stability anchors in financial markets? This is an invaluable comparison of public banks from countries at different economic development levels. The contributors highlight both the benefits of public banks and their governance failures, overcoming the sterile debate of private versus public. Empirically analyzing three countries with significant public banks - Brazil, Germany and India ? contributors support the Keynesian argument that public banks can contribute to employment by stabilizing the business cycle and by providing finance on a long-term basis. Taking cues from critical interpretative policy analysis, it is argued that neither changes in the incentive structure of management, nor institutional fora for public deliberations will prevent irresponsible behavior. Management?s perception of the mission of public banks has to change, as well as its understanding of their role in society. Public Banks in the Age of Financialization will give insight to advanced students of finance, comparative politics and public management. Policy experts and public bank managers will also benefit from the in-depth case studies that provoke discussion on both the positives and negatives of public banks. Contributors include: O. Butzbach, P. Chavan, S. Deos, M. Dieterle, K. Mettenheim, A. Nunes Ferreira, X. Polikhronidi, M. Rajeev, A.R. Ribeiro de Mendonca, C. Ruocco, C. Scherrer, D. Seikel, H. Semenyshyn, B.H. Sibin, E. Sotto Tibirica Rosa, T. Tagieva

This book encourages insurance companies and regulators to explore offering Islamic insurance to boost the insurance industry in India. The distinctive features of Takaful also make it appealing even to non-Muslims. According to the 2012 World Takaful Report, India has immense potential for Takaful is based on the size of its Muslim population and the growth of its economy. However, it is surprising that Takaful has yet to be introduced in India since it has been offered in non-majority Muslim countries, such as Singapore, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. When the concept and practice of Takaful are examined, it is free from interest, uncertainty, and gambling. These are the main elements prohibited in Islam. However, it has been evidenced that these elements are also banned in teaching other religions believed by the Indians. Given this landscape, this book fills the gap in research on the viability of Takaful in India, focusing on its empirical aspects by examining the perception of Indian insurance operators toward Takaful.