This book presents selected papers on the factors that serve to influence an individual's capacity in financial decision-making. Initial chapters provide an overview of the cognitive factors affecting financial decisions and suggest a link between limited cognitive capacity and the need for financial education. The book then expands on these cognitive limitations to explore the tendency for overconfidence in decision-making and the interplay between rational and irrational factors. Later contributions show how credit card companies benefit from limitations in consumer financial literacy, how gender and cognition intersect to play an important role in financial decision-making, and how to improve financial capacity through financial literacy and education campaigns, including those addressing developed marketplaces. This comprehensive collection of papers will be of value to all readers who seek to better understand the multi-factorial and complex nature of personal financial management in today's economic climate.

This book explores how, through spirituality and the development of character, Islamic financial institutions and Muslim communities can integrate their businesses with contemporary social responsibility initiatives to produce positive social and environmental impact. From the looming environmental crisis to the divide between mainstream and extremist interpretations of Islam, the book addresses significant questions facing Muslim communities - and humanity - and demonstrates why Islam should sit 'at the table' with other faiths and ethical traditions discussing humanity's great obstacles. Unlike existing literature, this work explores the intersections between classical Islamic ethics and spirituality, contemporary Islamic finance and economic markets, and select sustainability and impact initiatives (such as the Equator Principles and UN Principles of Responsible Investment) designed to make the worlds of business and finance responsible for the environments in which they operate and the communities that support them. Drawing on his years of experience in Islamic banking, Moghul addresses these applications in light of real-world practices and dilemmas, demonstrating how Islamic organizations and Muslim communities should embrace the broad range of stakeholders countenanced by the Shari'ah in conversations that affect them. By situating his exploration of Islamic finance in the light of the much larger critical issues of balance, justice, and moderation in Islamic praxis, Moghul creates an interdisciplinary book that will appeal to academics and researchers in economics, finance, business, government and policy, and law.

This book traces the development and analyses the performance of life insurance industry in India, since inception of this sector, using different business indicators over the years. It discusses the evolution and changing features of the Indian insurance industry in 3 phases: phase I from 1818 to 1956, phase II from 1956 to 2000 (known as the nationalisation period) and phase III post 2000 (called the post reform period). The book also measures the relative efficiency and productivity of the life insurance industry in India for the post-reform period, by employing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Despite the fact that the life insurance sector recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17% in terms of total premiums and 21% in terms of new business premium collections during the post reform period, the insurers continue to grapple with the issue of profitability. Against this background, the book presents results on the factors determining profitability of the life insurance companies using measures of efficiency and competition. By helping regulatory authorities determine the future course of action in the context of entry of foreign insurers and also in establishing a level playing field, the book has important policy implications.

This book demonstrates how the global market for Islamic financial services has shown strong growth in recent years and shown remarkable resilience during the global financial crisis. Drawing on a range of international perspectives from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Malaysia, Pakistan, Australia and Europe, this book explores the characteristics and performance of Islamic finance and banking and discusses future prospects. It offers a comprehensive theoretical framework for Shariah governance in Islamic financial institutions, explores Shariah-compliant equities, as well as issues in productivity, technology and efficiency. It includes a number of comparative studies on Islamic and conventional banks, Islamic and conventional unit trusts, and Islamic and conventional banks' product mixes. The challenges and opportunities for the expansion of Islamic finance and banking into Europe are explored through the contexts of the UK, Germany and Italy.

This volume brings together some of the most important articles on the topic of financial intermediaries. Financial Intermediaries puts recent developments into an appropriate historical setting, with seminal works by Edgeworth, Arrow, Gurley, Shaw, Baumol, Tobin and Stigler combined with more recent ones by Fischer, Black, Weiss and Stiglitz.

The Digital Hand, Volume 2, is a historical survey of how computers and telecommunications have been deployed in over a dozen industries in the financial, telecommunications, media and entertainment sectors over the past half century. It is past of a sweeping three-volume description of how management in some forty industries embraced the computer and changed the American economy. Computers have fundamentally changed the nature of work in America. However it is difficult to grasp the full extent of these changes and their implications for the future of business. To begin the long process of understanding the effects of computing in American business, we need to know the history of how computers were first used, by whom and why. In this, the second volume of The Digital Hand, James W. Cortada combines detailed analysis with narrative history to provide a broad overview of computing's and telecomunications' role in over a dozen industries, ranging from Old Economy sectors like finance and publishing to New Economy sectors like digital photography and video games. He also devotes considerable attention to the rapidly changing media and entertainment industries which are now some of the most technologically advanced in the American economy. Beginning in 1950, when commercial applications of digital technology began to appear, Cortada examines the ways different industries adopted new technologies, as well as the ways their innovative applications influenced other industries and the US economy as a whole. He builds on the surveys presented in the first volume of the series, which examined sixteen manufacturing, process, transportation, wholesale and retail industries. In addition to thisaccount, of computers' impact on industries, Cortada also demonstrates how industries themselves influenced the nature of digital technology. Managers, historians and others interested in the history of modern business will appreciate this historical analysis of digital technology's many roles and future possibilities in an wide array of industries. The Digital Hand provides a detailed picture of what the infrastructure of the Information Age really looks like and how we got there.

This book investigates how the Blockchain Technology (BCT) for Supply Chain Finance (SCF) programs allows businesses to come together in partnerships and accelerate cash flows throughout the supply chain. BCT promises to change the way individuals and corporations exchange value and information over the Internet, and is perfectly positioned to enable new levels of collaboration among the supply chain actors. The book reveals new opportunities stemming from the application of BCT to SCF financing solutions, particularly reverse factoring - or approved payables financing. To do so, it first identifies the principal barriers and pain points in delivering financing solutions. Then, a possible blockchain-driven supply chain model is defined. Using this framework, the book subsequently discusses relevant use cases for the technology, which could open up new opportunities in the SCF space. It demonstrates that blockchain and distributed ledgers technologies could deliver substantial benefits for all parties involved in SCF transactions, promising to expedite the processes and lower the overall costs of financing programs. Industry giants such as IBM, Maersk, China-based Dianrong and FnConn (a Foxconn subsidiary) are currently working to digitize the global, cross-border supply chain using blockchain technology, and will likely soon create blockchain platforms for supply chain finance. These solutions aim to reduce complexity and make data sharing more secure, accurate and efficient. This book offers a highly topical resource for stakeholders across the entire supply chain, helping them prepare for the upcoming technological revolution.

The macroeconomic development of most major industrial economies is characterised by boom-bust cycles. Normally such boom-bust cycles are driven by specific sectors of the economy. In the financial meltdown of the years 2007-9 it was the credit sector and the real-estate sector that were the main driving forces. This book takes on the challenge of interpreting and modelling this meltdown. In doing so it revives the traditional Keynesian approach to the financial-real economy interaction and the business cycle, extending it in several important ways. In particular, it adopts the Keynesian view of a hierarchy of markets and introduces a detailed financial sector into the traditional Keynesian framework. The approach of the book goes beyond the currently dominant paradigm based on the representative agent, market clearing and rational economic agents. Instead it proposes an economy populated with heterogeneous, rationally bounded agents attempting to cope with disequilibria in various markets.

Philip Radner analyzes equity financing phenomena and researches IPO underpricing and SEO announcement effects using data sets for US REITs. Moreover, he discusses underpricing theories and their applicability in the REIT context and gives a theoretical background on IPOs and on underpricing in particular. With this background at hand, the results out of this dissertation imply to focus on the wording in IPO documents as it can help to maximize IPO proceeds. In addition, he analyzes how to better time and announce subsequent equity financing events. It is expected that significantly underpriced issues attract more investors and that subsequent SEOs are then easier to conduct and typically raise more capital.

Many years on after the 2007-8 financial crisis, most developed nations still find themselves in a state of weak recovery, high debt pile-up and distributive disparity. The intriguing question that we face is whether the golden days of modern capitalism are over, or if capitalism is just undergoing another period of adjustment characteristic of its past. What is disheartening is that the twin economic goals of sustainable growth and equality, which the world has now come to recognise as of paramount importance but mutually conflicting, remain, more now than ever, illusive and unattainable. Growth Without Inequality attempts to address this issue and to provide a pragmatic solution especially for nations in the current policy gridlock. By offering a unified framework of factors that drive growth, it shows how growth also gives rise to an array of "anomalous market forms" (defined by different degrees of value and risk visibility) that subvert distributive equity between labour and capital. It debunks both the pure free market solution and the mixed economy approach on the ground that they fail to arrest the growth propelling yet subversive power inherent in the "corporate forms" under the present capitalistic regime. Having shown that effective reform can hardly take place within the system itself, this book proposes to build a separate sector (Economy II) and partition it from the existing system (Economy I). The solution is easy to implement and quick to take effect. By one single stroke, this "Non-Marxist" solution can happily achieve the ideals of both "competitive capitalism" and "egalitarian socialism".

This text looks at rulemaking in one of the most important areas of economic life - financial services. The book has three main aims: first, to build a jurisprudential and linguistic analysis of rules and interpretation, drawing out the implication of these analyses and developing quality proposals for how rules could be used as instruments of regulation. Second, it interprets that analysis and set of proposals with an empirical study of the formation and use of rules in a particular regulatory system - financial services, and third, it evaluates the nature of the rulemaking process. The authors main case study, examining the use of self-regulation in the financial services sector, complements the detailed analysis of rule formation and uses.

The Chinese insurance industry has experienced rapid development during the past decade. This original book is the first English language study in the literature to address the efficiency issue of the Chinese insurance sector, and presents a comprehensive review on alternative methodologies for analyzing firm efficiency.The authors suggest alternative ways to improve performance of insurance companies in China and make useful policy recommendations on regulation, competition and development of the insurance industry. They expand the applications of data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis in the literature on technical efficiency and discuss managerial implications for both insurance companies and policymakers. Performance of the Chinese Insurance Industry under Economic Reforms will be significant for academic researchers and students of economics, finance and business. Managers of financial institutions in China and the rest of the world will find this important book intriguing, as will policymakers and regulators working in the financial and insurance industries.

Dino Falaschetti and Michael Orlando unify the treatment of the many deeply related topics in money and banking in this wide-ranging book. By continually building on the assumption that economic actors are maximizers, they explain how monetary and financial services, as well as related governance mechanisms, influence economic performance. In this manner, Money, Financial Intermediation and Governance not only lets readers make sense of today's monetary authorities and financial markets, it lets them see through superficial complexities to the fundamental influences that will shape those organizations for years to come. Mastering this analytical process is important for scholars and professionals, as well as individuals who are interested in their own financial security. Successful readers will enjoy an enduring ability to productively anticipate, respond to, and even shape macroeconomic and related political developments. This book's greatest contribution may thus be to help readers enjoy the lasting advantages of becoming careful thinkers. This book is an ideal text for undergraduate, graduate and MBA students in courses on banking and financial markets as well as in macroeconomics. It is also a useful resource for researchers and professionals in the financial, legal and policy sectors.

Blockchain and artificial intelligence are perhaps the two most significant disruptive technologies this century and both will significantly rewire the world of global financial markets and the world in which we live. While blockchain offers a number of significant advantages over traditional forms of finance including lower cost and massive increases in operational efficiencies of traded markets, property records and a whole host of transaction processes, artificial intelligence is moving fast from basic structured machine learning doing menial yet important big data tasks like credit card fraud detection to predictive analysis and real-time real-world risk management and investment decision making. There is still a lot of confusion in the market about cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology. Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence highlights the underlying technologies of blockchain and the differences between cryptocurrencies and blockchain financial applications. It explores the current AI offerings and gives a vision of the fast-moving developments in this area including the many solutions that are expected to revolutionize the way financial and commodity markets will operate in the future.

Thrive in a changing industry by putting your people first Advisory Leadership is a practical and highly executable guide for financial advisors and finance professionals looking to thrive in today's changing financial services industry. Written by a leading financial advisor with practice improvement expertise, this book shows you how to master the art of leadership while remaining agile and adaptable. You'll learn the seven steps you must take to keep pace and thrive amidst the industry's evolution, with clearly articulated explanations and motivational action items. The discussion covers patience, integrity, compassion, respect, consistency, encouragement, and courage the foundations of success and continued growth and shows you how to practice what you preach with real strategies for living the vision and being a true leader. The financial services industry is at a crossroads, between a generation on the cusp of retirement and the new generation stepping in to take its place. This transition has been called a crisis of culture, of values, and of communication, but it's really an opportunity. This book faces the changes head-on, and delivers practical solutions that start and end with your greatest resource your people. * Unlock the secrets to a people-first company * Speak openly, walk the walk, and promote personal growth * Reward firm-wide collaboration and a team mentality * Reshape your company's DNA to thrive in today's financial environment The industry's overarching question is one of differentiation: how can your firm stand out amid the rise of robo-solutions and an unpredictable future? Advisory Leadership shows you how a people-focused company culture can elevate a firm from surviving to thriving.

The degree to which markets incorporate information is one of the most important questions facing economists today. This book provides a fascinating study of the existence and extent of information efficiency in financial markets, with a special focus on betting markets. Betting markets are selected for study because they incorporate features highly appropriate to a study of information efficiency, in particular the fact that each bet has a well-defined end point at which its value becomes certain. Using international examples, this book reviews and analyses the issue of information efficiency in both financial and betting markets. Part I is an extensive survey of the existing literature, while Part II presents a range of readings by leading academics. Insights gained from the book will interest students of financial economics, financial market analysts, mathematicians and statisticians, and all those with a special interest in finance or gambling.

For most Americans, the savings and loan industry is defined by the fraud, ineptitude and failures of the 1980s. However, these events overshadow a long history in which thrifts played a key role in helping thousands of households buy homes. First appearing in the 1830s savings and loans, then known as building and loans, encourage their working-class members to adhere to the principles of thrift and mutual co-operation as a way to achieve the 'American Dream' of home ownership. This book traces the development of this industry from its origins as a movement of a loosely affiliated collection of institutions into a major element of America's financial markets. It also analyses how diverse groups of Americans, including women, ethnic Americans and African Americans, used thrifts to improve their lives and elevate their positions in society. Finally the overall historical perspective sheds new light on the events of the 1980s and analyses the efforts to rehabilitate the industry in the 1990s.

Investment Banking: Institutions, Politics, and Law provides an economic rationale for the dominant role of investment banks in the capital markets, and uses it to explain both the historical evolution of the investment banking industry and also recent changes to its organization. Although investment decisions rely upon price-relevant information, it is impossible to establish property rights over it and hence it is very hard to coordinate its exchange. The authors argue that investment banks help to resolve this problem by managing "information marketplaces," within which extra-legal institutions support the production and dissemination of information that is important to investors. Reputations and relationships are more important in fulfilling this role than financial capital.
The authors substantiate their theory with reference to the industry's evolution during the last three centuries. They show how investment banking networks were formed, and identify the informal contracts that they supported. This historical development points to tensions between the relational contracting of investment banks and the regulatory impulses of the State, thus providing some explanation for the periodic large-scale State intervention in the operation of capital markets. Their theory also provides a technological explanation for the massive restructuring of the capital markets in recent decades, which the authors argue can be used to think about the likely future direction of the investment banking industry.

Many years on after the 2007-8 financial crisis, most developed nations still find themselves in a state of weak recovery, high debt pile-up and distributive disparity. The intriguing question that we face is whether the golden days of modern capitalism are over, or if capitalism is just undergoing another period of adjustment characteristic of its past. What is disheartening is that the twin economic goals of sustainable growth and equality, which the world has now come to recognise as of paramount importance but mutually conflicting, remain, more now than ever, illusive and unattainable. Growth Without Inequality attempts to address this issue and to provide a pragmatic solution especially for nations in the current policy gridlock. By offering a unified framework of factors that drive growth, it shows how growth also gives rise to an array of "anomalous market forms" (defined by different degrees of value and risk visibility) that subvert distributive equity between labour and capital. It debunks both the pure free market solution and the mixed economy approach on the ground that they fail to arrest the growth propelling yet subversive power inherent in the "corporate forms" under the present capitalistic regime. Having shown that effective reform can hardly take place within the system itself, this book proposes to build a separate sector (Economy II) and partition it from the existing system (Economy I). The solution is easy to implement and quick to take effect. By one single stroke, this "Non-Marxist" solution can happily achieve the ideals of both "competitive capitalism" and "egalitarian socialism".

In the collective psyche, a financier is a capitalist. In managerial capitalism, the notion of the 'manager' emerged, and the role of the manager was distinct from the role of the 'owner'. Financial capitalism is similarly underpinned by financiers who are not the holders of the financial assets they buy, sell, trade or advise upon. Finance at Work explores the world of financiers, be they finance-oriented CEOs, CFOs, financial journalists, mergers and acquisitions' advisors or wealth managers. Part I investigates the professional trajectories of members of corporate boards and financialisation as the dissemination of financial logic outside its primary 'iron cage'; Part II responds by studying financiers at work within financial occupations or financial operations involving external actors; while Part III pursues the issue of financial boundaries by seeking out the way financial logic crosses these boundaries. Part IV takes back the hypothesis of differentiations within finance presented in Part I, and analyses the internal boundaries of asset management, wealth management and leveraged buyout (LBO) acquisitions. This book is essential reading for researchers and academics within the field of finance who aim to understand the 'spread of finance' in contemporary societies.

The internet is dramatically transforming the way business is done, particularly for financial services. Digital Finance takes a thoughtful look at how the industry is evolving, and it explains how to integrate concepts of digital finance into existing traditional finance platforms. This book explores what successful companies are doing to maximize their opportunities in this context and offers suggestions on how to introduce digital finance into a firm's structure. Specific strategies for a digital future are presented, alongside numerous case studies that explore key attributes of success. In recognition of the rapidly evolving nature of finance today, Digital Finance is accompanied by a website maintained by the author (PerryBeaumont.com), as well as links to other content with insightful articles, analyses, and opinions. For both practitioners and students of finance, Digital Finance provides a rich context for a better understanding of the landscape of finance today, and lays the foundation for us to process and create the financial innovations of tomorrow.