Venture capital (VC) refers to investments provided to early-stage, innovative, and high growth start-up companies. A common characteristic of all venture capital investments is that investee companies do not have cash flows to pay interest on debt or dividends on equity. Rather, investments are made with a view towards capital gain on exit. The most sought after exit routes are an initial public offering (IPO), where a company lists on a stock exchange for the first time, and an acquisition exit (trade sale), where the company is sold in entirety to another company. However, VCs often exit their investments by secondary sales, wherein the entrepreneur retains his or her share but the VC sells to another company or investor buybacks, where the entrepreneur repurchases the VCs interest and write-offs (liquidations).
The Oxford Handbook of Venture Capital provides a comprehensive picture of all the issues dealing with the structure, governance, and performance of venture capital from a global perspective. The handbook comprises contributions from 55 authors currently based in 12 different countries.

Today, international investment law consists of a network of multifaceted, multilayered international treaties that, in one way or another, involve virtually every country of the world. The evolution of this network continues, raising a host of issues regarding international investment law and policy, especially in the area of international investment disputes. This Yearbook monitors current developments in international investment law and policy, focusing (in Part One) on trends in foreign direct investment (FDI), international investment agreements, and investment disputes, with a special look at developments in the oil and gas sector. Part Two, then, looks at central issues in the contemporary discussions on international investment law and policy. With contributions by leading experts in the field, this title provides timely, authoritative information on FDI that can be used by a wide audience, including practitioners, academics, researchers, and policy makers.

The Federal Reserve System-the central bank of the United States, better known as The Fed-has never been more controversial. Criticism has reached such levels that Congressman Ron Paul, contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, published End the Fed, with blurbs from musician Arlo Guthrie and actor Vince Vaughn. And yet, amid a slow economy and partisan gridlock, the Fed has never been more important. Stephen H. Axilrod explains this influential agency-its powers, operations, how it sets policy-in The Federal Reserve, a timely addition to Oxford's acclaimed series What Everyone Needs to Know. Of the two major governmental tools for shaping the economy, Congress controls fiscal policy-taxation and spending-and the Fed makes monetary policy-influencing how much money circulates in the economy, and how quickly. Traditionally the Fed has relied on three instruments: open-market operations (buying and selling U.S. bonds), lending to banks, and setting reserve requirements on bank deposits. It also helps to regulate the financial system. Drawing on years of experience inside the Federal Reserve System, Axilrod shows how these tools actually work, and answers a series of increasingly detailed questions in the series format. He asks, for instance, if the system of regional Fed banks needs modification for today's technological landscape; if there is corruption in the Fed's governance; what happens to profits from its operations; the impact of political pressure; the extent of Congressional oversight; and just how independent it truly is. Whether discussing the Fed's balance sheet through the financial crisis of 2008 and beyond, the federal funds rate, or the international context, Axilrod displays a mastery of his subject Coming in time for the Fed's 100th anniversary in 2013, this book deftly explains an institution that every American needs to understand.

This book takes a fresh look at understanding how financial markets behave. Using recent ideas from the highly-topical science of complexity and complex systems, the book provides the basis for a unified theoretical description of how today's markets really work. Since financial markets are an excellent example of a complex system, the book also doubles as a science textbook.

In this controversial and authoritative account of Japan's public budgeting and politics, the author traces the origins and development of Japan's present fiscal crisis. In a detailed analysis of the institutions, structures, and processes of central government, the role of the Ministry of Finance is analysed and its relationship with other ministries in deciding how much to spend and on what is examined. Drawing on a rich archive of interview material and primary budget data, the author explains how and why Japan accumulated the world's largest public debt.

This is a study of the law governing the bank-customer relationship pertaining to the disposition of funds by cheques and credit transfers, covering both paper-based and electronic payments. The work addresses, with various degrees of detail, common law, civilian, and `mixed' jurisdictions, particularly, Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States. In addition to the description of the law in these jurisdictions, the book contains an in-depth analysis of the common issues and the responses to them, in light of desired policies. Accordingly, an evaluation of the various rules and proposals for reform are integral parts of the study.

Now with the latest and safest strategies for smart investing in the new economy

A perennial bestseller, Nancy Dunnan's "How to Invest $50-$5,000" has been a trusted advisor for more than two decades. But never before has the economy changed so radically in so short a time. This new edition reflects the latest, smartest strategies for small investing in the current economy, and has fully updated information on all of the recent changes in federal regulations and laws.

Covering the full range of small investing--from selecting a bank to choosing specific investments to making sense of financial pages--Dunnan guides even the most inexperienced investor through the maze of stocks, bonds, treasuries, mutual funds, and more. Now more than ever, "How to Invest $50-$5,000" is an indispensable handbook for small investors--pointing the way toward the best low-risk, high-value opportunities available in the current U.S. economy.

The focus of this volume of Acta Juridica - Foreign Direct Investment and the Law: Perspectives from Selected African Countries - is the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and the law, within the context of FDI in Africa and the role of the Agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The book is a compilation of essays by authors who are specialists from across the spectrum of the law, bringing together their diverse contributions under the banner of foreign direct investment. More specifically, the authors consider the law and foreign direct investment from an African perspective, both regionally and country-specific, in the context of bilateral investment treaties, property law, the legal integration of business law, the role of investment and regulatory policies, dispute resolution, tax incentives and labour regulation.

In response to the recent surge in extractive natural resource investments in Africa, this insightful book explores how relations between investors, ruling elites, and local populations develop when large-scale investments in gas, minerals, and agriculture expand. Advancing a multi-level approach that encompasses rigorous theoretical analysis, fieldwork, and literature review, expert contributors examine the implementation of natural resource investments and the extent to which they respect procedural rights of local populations. Chapters draw together understudied bodies of literature on land-grabbing debates, the resource curse controversy and corporate social responsibility (CSR), demonstrating how the chances of large-scale investments in natural resources are at their greatest when characterised by 'reciprocal exchange deals' between investors and local populations, 'compatible interests' between ruling elites and investors, and 'mutual recognition' between local populations and ruling elites. Through a careful examination of case studies in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda, the book ultimately highlights the complexity of the political economy of natural resource investments. Providing valuable theoretical and empirical insights, this book will be an invigorating read for scholars and students of political economy, political geography, sustainability, CSR, and business studies. Its valuable insights on how natural resource investments might accelerate economic growth and consolidate links between local and global economies will also be of interest to development practitioners and investors.

South Africa's property law teachers have been convening annually since 1985 to exchange ideas, subject their work to peer scrutiny and build a collegial network. Over time, the agendas of the annual meetings became snapshots of the development of a discipline. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of this meeting, the property law teachers' colloquium was expanded into an International property law conference, giving South African property law teachers an opportunity to exchange their ideas on a much broader platform, with some of the world's best property law scholars and teachers. Property law under scrutiny brings together pieces that give an overview of property law twenty-five years after the establishment of the South African property law teachers' colloquium. A recurrent theme in all the contributions at the conference, and the ones included in this publication, is the tension between well-established principles of property law and the policies that drive legal development in the field. The topics addressed are organised into four themes, as follows: The first cluster relates to an age-old issue in conventional property law: The accession of movables to immovables; The second cluster concerns the centrality of the real agreement in transfers and in the real security context; A third cluster deals with questions about the public law aspects of property; The fourth cluster captures some of the dilemmas and challenges concerning the abandonment and neglect of property. It ties together the underlying concerns aired in debates about the conventional property rules and issues surfacing in the crossover between private and public law, and the role of property law principles. In capturing the interaction between South African and international scholarship, Property law under scrutiny serves to introduce a new era in this developing discipline. Teachers and practitioners of property law, locally and internationally, will find this to be an invaluable resource.

Connections among different assets, asset classes, portfolios, and the stocks of individual institutions are critical in examining financial markets. Interest in financial markets implies interest in underlying macroeconomic fundamentals. In Financial and Macroeconomic Connectedness, Frank Diebold and Kamil Yilmaz propose a simple framework for defining, measuring, and monitoring connectedness, which is central to finance and macroeconomics. These measures of connectedness are theoretically rigorous yet empirically relevant. The approach to connectedness proposed by the authors is intimately related to the familiar econometric notion of variance decomposition. The full set of variance decompositions from vector auto-regressions produces the core of the 'connectedness table.' The connectedness table makes clear how one can begin with the most disaggregated pair-wise directional connectedness measures and aggregate them in various ways to obtain total connectedness measures. The authors also show that variance decompositions define weighted, directed networks, so that these proposed connectedness measures are intimately related to key measures of connectedness used in the network literature. After describing their methods in the first part of the book, the authors proceed to characterize daily return and volatility connectedness across major asset (stock, bond, foreign exchange and commodity) markets as well as the financial institutions within the U.S. and across countries since late 1990s. These specific measures of volatility connectedness show that stock markets played a critical role in spreading the volatility shocks from the U.S. to other countries. Furthermore, while the return connectedness across stock markets increased gradually over time the volatility connectedness measures were subject to significant jumps during major crisis events. This book examines not only financial connectedness, but also real fundamental connectedness. In particular, the authors show that global business cycle connectedness is economically significant and time-varying, that the U.S. has disproportionately high connectedness to others, and that pairwise country connectedness is inversely related to bilateral trade surpluses.

Combined Transport Documents provides a comprehensive guide to combined transport or multi-modal contracts. It examines the main contracts that deal with combined transport logically, from those concerned with the procuring of tonnage through to those that deal with general average and salvage. It also focuses on the complicated chains of indemnity particular to multimember consortium operations and explains in substantial detail a recommended draft bill of lading contract of carriage which the author himself developed. Combined Transport Documents provides a comprehensive guide to combined transport or multi-modal contracts. It examines the main contracts that deal with combined transport logically, from those concerned with the procuring of tonnage through to those that deal with general average and salvage. It also focuses on the complicated chains of indemnity particular to multi-member consortium operations and explains in substantial detail a recommended draft bill of lading contract of carriage which the author himself developed.

At a time of increasing demands on budgets, governments around the world are seeking to reduce health expenditure and introduce market-oriented reforms to the health sector. This is leading to profound shifts in the relationship between the state and the individual, as policy makers dismantle the welfare state and move towards a user-pays sytem.Health Policy in the Market State offers an overview of health policy in Australia, locating it within the broader context of power and interests analysis and shifts in government policy and public sector restructuring. It outlines the key issues in current health policy and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of specific policies and programs.Contributors include Ian Anderson and Maggie Brady, Mary Draper, Stephen Duckett, Liz Eckerman, Sophie Hill, Sharon Moore, Michael Muetzelfeldt, Janine Smith and Beth Wilson.Health Policy in the Market State is a valuable overview for students, as well as a comprehensive reference for health professionals and policy-makers.

3i (Investors in Industry, and formerly the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, etc.) is Britain's leading venture capital company. Founded in 1945 as a result of a combination of pressures and counter-pressures from political parties, Whitehall, the Bank of England, and the clearing banks, the organization has played a significant role in post-war investment banking and industrial development.
The first part of the book traces its history from the early years of post-war reconstruction and the role played by Piercy and Kinross, through the years of consolidation, to the higher-profile years of the change of name and style and the 1994 flotation. The second part offers an inside view of the workings of this unique institution - the controllers, 3i's role in developing MBOs, methods of assessing risk and return, its relationship with capital markets, etc.
During its first 50 years 3i has invested in numerous well known and successful companies - many of these are detailed in the text (British Caledonian, Oxford Instruments, Laura Ashley, etc.). The book is also elegantly and innovatively designed, making good use of the well known 3i cartoons.

Explore an insightful and female perspective on the world of personal finance In Invest Like a Girl, celebrated personal finance guru Simran Kaur walks you through critical investing decisions from a female perspective, explaining woman-centered financial strategies that take into account realities only the fairer sex has to deal with. From the gender-based wage differential to the costs incurred by having children and raising a family, this book examines crucial personal finance concepts in a way that will make sense to women everywhere. Invest Like a Girl is an ideal guide for women interested in putting their wealth to work, as well as finance professionals who seek to better understand the perspectives of their female clients.

The collapse in commodity prices since 1980 has been a major cause of the economic crisis in a large number of developing countries. This book investigates whether the commodity-producing countries, by joint action, could have prevented the price collapse by appropriate supply management. The analysis is focused on the markets for the tropical beverage crops: coffee, cocoa, and tea. Using new econometric models for each market, the impact of alternative supply management schemes on supply, consumption, prices, and export earnings is simulated for the later 1980s. The results indicate that supply management by producing countries would, indeed, have been a viable alternative to the `free market' approach favoured by the developed countries. This has important implications for current international commodity policy, and, in particular, for future joint action by producing countries to overcome persistent commodity surpluses as a complement to needed diversification.

By terrorism expert Rachel Ehrenfeld, uncovers the clandestine and sinister ways that Islamic terrorist groups finance their global network. Terrorist have grown increasingly savvy in ways to bolster their financial power. Dr. Ehrenfeld's investigation also details how these undected billions are spent to bring about chaos and destablization. Funding Evil show offers realistic and provocative strategies for winning the war on terror.

This book is the first coherent quantified assessment of the economy of the Roman Empire. George Maher argues inventively and rigorously for a much higher level of growth and prosperity than has hitherto been imagined, and also explains why, nonetheless, the Roman Empire did not achieve the transition which began in Georgian Britain. This book will have an enormous impact on Roman history and be required reading for all teachers and students in the field. It will also interest and provoke historians of the medieval and early modern periods into wondering why their economies failed to match the Roman level. Part of the problem in assessing the Roman economy is that we do not have much in the way of numerical data, but Roman historians, who rarely have much statistical expertise, have not always recognised the potential of the data we do have. Dr Maher's reassessment of the economy of the Roman Empire has to use the same data as everyone else, but he is able to draw strikingly novel conclusions in two ways: first, by more statistically sophisticated use of a few crucial datasets and, second, by correlating and drawing a coherent picture across the whole economy. On grain yields, firstly, instead of getting bogged down in details of individual cases, George Maher shows how there is a remarkably consistent pattern from which outliers can be excluded, showing yields were much higher than normally assumed. He then demonstrates that high yields are in fact necessary to explain the exceptional urbanization of the Empire. Urbanization at this level in turn, as George Maher shows, has implications for consumption and commerce. He takes this further to show how high levels of trade imply high levels of sophistication in economic practices and mentality. In one of his most methodologically novel chapters, George Maher develops a new and simpler way of assessing average life expectancy and argues for a life expectancy almost double the traditional view. This book, Dr George Maher's doctoral thesis, is the theoretical underpinning of his book Pugnare: Economic Success and Failure.

The modern world is built on commodities - from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they have come from. But we should.

The World for Sale lifts the lid on one of the least scrutinized corners of the world economy: the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard, and sell the earth's resources. It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets, enabling an enormous expansion in international trade and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world's financial centers.

The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.

This title is the first of its kind in South Africa. It comprehensively covers the South African tax and exchange control provisions which apply to local and foreign trusts. In addition to normal discretionary trusts, the taxation of the following types of trusts is covered: business trusts; charitable trusts; BEE trusts; employee share scheme trusts; offshore trusts; special trusts; asset protection; will trusts. The following types of taxes are also discussed in a trust context: Income Tax; CGT; Transfer Duty; Donations Tax; Estate Duty; International Tax; Transfer Pricing; VAT. The first-ever book exclusively covering the direct and indirect taxation of trusts in South Africa, including a chapter on the application of the exchange control regulations to both onshore and offshore trusts.