Reinsurance is an invisible service industry which enables insurance companies to insure more risks and to make better use of their resources. Until recently, reinsurers were only known to a small minority outside the insurance community. Major disasters, especially those caused by natural catastrophes, have increasingly brought the industry into the spotlight. Yet what is perceived today by a wider public still only represents a fraction of the industry, and the mechanisms of reinsurance to deal with global risk exposure are virtually unknown. The Value of Risk provides an overview of how today's reinsurance industry developed. It investigates for the first time the role of reinsurers in a changing risk, economic, and market environment. Harold James explains the fundamental principles of insuring and outlines the evolution of the industry in his introductory essay. In Part I, Peter Borscheid describes in detail the global spread of modern insurance, which emerged in the late eighteenth century amidst ideas of rationalism which attempted to quantify risk in monetary terms, the setbacks it encountered, and how the market environment changed over time. Professional reinsurance emerged with the rise in insured risks in the industrialising mid-nineteenth century. By the time the San Francisco Earthquake happened in 1906 the reinsurance industry had become well established and showed a remarkable ability to deal collectively with the catastrophe. David Gugerli describes in Part II how the industry as a whole dealt with such challenges but also the numerous exposures to a changing risk landscape. Against this background, in Part III Tobias Straumann examines the history of the Swiss Reinsurance Company, founded in 1863, providing a fascinating example of how professional risk taking was developed over the last 150 years.

Over the past couple of decades, differentials in the level of private contributions to charitable organizations have become a central matter of public policy. Because private charitable contributions finance many socially valuable activities (for example, education and the arts), many governments have tried to boost private philanthropy through various active policy interventions. Furthermore, the temptation to rely on private contributions to finance the provision of public goods has increased substantially in recent years as fiscal constraints have become tighter. Yet there is little robust quantitative evidence regarding the differentials in private charitable giving across countries, and more importantly very little consensus on why these differentials may exist. This volume provides an original, comparative, and historical analysis of charitable giving and of tax policies towards private philanthropy across different countries. It sheds new light on the determinants of private philanthropy and offers interesting practical insights for improving tax policies towards charitable giving.

Why do so many smart professional people make bad investments? Why do they often fail to accumulate significant wealth and sometimes make truly disastrous financial decisions? This book offers some answers to these questions. It then provides specific recommendations to help doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers, and many other intelligent people avoid serious financial errors and achieve superior investment results. Sensible self-directed investing with long-term compounding of returns and avoidance of all unnecessary fees can produce remarkable accumulations of capital with limited risk. You can choose to be successful as a largely passive investor or as one more seriously involved in making individual investment decisions. This book tells you how to do it. Buying this short volume and then putting its advice into practice may become the most important financial decisions you have ever made. About the author - Joseph D. Schulman is an internationally known physician, medical research scientist, and biomedical entrepreneur. He is also a successful investor. Dr. Schulman is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and of the Executive M.B.A. (OPM) program at Harvard Business School. He lives with his wife, Dixie, in Oxford, MD and Palm Springs, CA.

Investing isn't a man's world anymore--and that's a good thing for individual portfolios, Wall Street, and the world's financial system.

Warren Buffettand the women of the world have one thing in common: they are better investors than the average man. Psychologists and scientists have shown that women have the kind of temperaments that help them achieve long-term success in the market. For instance, women spend more time researching their investment choices and tend to take less risk than men do, which prevents them from chasing "hot" tips and trading on whims. And women aren't as susceptible to peer pressure as men are, which results in a more levelheaded, patient approach to investing. This book shows that women, with their patience and good decision making, epitomize the Foolish temperament of the most successful investor in the world. It will empower and educate women--and the men smart enough to embrace a "feminine" investing style--on how to strengthen their portfolios and find success in the market.

A compelling argument for placing entrepreneurship at the heart of economic development provides a guidebook for how this can be done efficiently, effectively, and equitably. Investing in Entrepreneurs: A Strategic Approach for Strengthening Your Regional and Community Economy offers a compelling argument for making the support of entrepreneurship the centerpiece of local and regional economic development—and provides a plan to make it happen. The book is organized around a tool, developed by the authors, that permits a community to strategically map and manage its business assets in a way that can transform its economy. Investing in Entrepreneurs begins with a reflection on the importance of entrepreneurship, a discussion of its diminished place in economic development, and a call for its rise back to prominence. The importance of managing entrepreneurial assets is discussed, followed by a thorough articulation of the author's tool for accomplishing this in a holistic and strategic manner. Examples drawn from the authors' fieldwork illustrate the many ways in which the tool can be utilized to guide economic development efforts. A final chapter discusses possible resistance to this innovation and how that resistance can be successfully addressed.

Global Bank Regulation: Principles and Policies covers the global regulation of financial institutions. It integrates theories, history, and policy debates, thereby providing a strategic approach to understanding global policy principles and banking. The book features definitions of the policy principles of capital regularization, the main justifications for prudent regulation of banks, the characteristics of tools used regulate firms that operate across all time zones, and a discussion regarding the 2007-2009 financial crises and the generation of international standards of financial institution regulation. The first four chapters of the book offer justification for the strict regulation of banks and discuss the importance of financial safety. The next chapters describe in greater detail the main policy networks and standard setting bodies responsible for policy development. They also provide information about bank licensing requirements, leading jurisdictions, and bank ownership and affiliations. The last three chapters of the book present a thorough examination of bank capital regulation, which is one of the most important areas in international banking. The text aims to provide information to all economics students, as well as non-experts and experts interested in the history, policy development, and theory of international banking regulation.

This book provides an overview of private real estate markets and investments. The 14 chapters are divided into three sections for conventional and alternative real estate investments and regulatory issues. Conventional investable real assets examined are retail spaces, apartments, offices, and industrial facilities owned by corporate entities. Alternative real estate assets are uniquely and extensively addressed. These include healthcare, both for facilities and the pricing to make it an investable asset; infrastructure contains roads, bridges, and public utilities; and resources are in land, agriculture, oil, and gas. The regulatory section includes appraisal and valuation, brokerage and transaction costs, sustainability, and green buildings. Readers should gain a greater appreciation of what is needed to be successful when investing in private real estate markets.
The share of real estate in institutional portfolios has risen above a previous 5% target, as investors avoid the risks of low interest rates. The world's wealth is shifting to emerging markets where real estate is already a dominant asset class and public securities markets are limited. Institutions with long horizons avoid publicly traded markets because they want to capture any premium from illiquidity. Real estate involves local and cultural restrictions on land usage, sustainability and on the regulation of the illiquidity.
For information about public real estate, read Public Real Estate Markets and Investments.