This book presents important aspects of the New-Keynesian theory of monetary policy and its implications for the practical decision making of central bankers today. It brings together several new research contributions that were presented at the scientific symposium on the occasion of the award of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics 2007 to Professor Michael Woodford of Columbia University. Woodford received this prize according to the jury in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory and practical analysis of monetary policy. The prize jury included Gunter Franke, Michael Haliassos, Otmar Issing, Jan Krahnen, Patrick Lane, Lucrezia Reichlin, Reinhardt Schmidt, Lars Svensson, Norbert Walter and Volker Wieland. The first part on "The New-Keynesian Approach to Understanding the Economy" contains two chapters written by Bennett McCallum and Jordi Gali, respectively. McCallum provides an exposition of key elements of the New-Keynesian approach to monetary policy analysis and an appreciation of Woodford's contributions. Gali further develops several key lessons of this approach and points out important new directions for further research.

A variety of quantitative concepts and models essential to understanding financial markets are introduced and explained in this broad overview of financial analytical tools designed for financial practitioners, advanced students, and researchers lacking a strong mathematical background. Coverage ranges from matrix mathematics and elementary calculus with their applications to portfolio and fixed income analysis to probability and stochastic processes with their applications to option pricing. The book is sequenced by mathematics topics, most of which are followed by relevant usage to areas such as valuation, risk management, derivatives, back-testing of financial models, and market efficiency.

The book begins by motivating the need for understanding quantitative technique with a brief discussion of financial mathematics and financial literature review. Preliminary concepts including geometric expansion, elementary statistics, and basic portfolio techniques are introduced in chapters 2 and 3. Chapters 4 and 5 present matrix mathematics and differential calculus applied to yield curves, APT, state preference theory, binomal option pricing, mean-variance analysis, and other applications. Integral calculus and differential equations follow in chapter 6. The rest of the book covers applications of probability, statistics and stochastic processes as well as a sampling of topics from numerical methods used in financial analysis.

Mainstream research has rationalized China's stock market on the basis of paradigms such as the institutional approach, the efficient market hypothesis, and corporate valuation principles. The deviations from such paradigms have been analyzed as puzzles of China's stock market. Girardin and Liu explore to what extent, in the perspective of Chinese cultural and historical characteristics, far from being puzzles, these 'deviations' are rather the symptoms of a consistent strategy for the design, development and regulation of a government-dominated financial system. This book will help investors, observers and researchers understand the hidden logic of the design and functioning of China's modern stock market, taking a political economy view.

Behavioural economics and behavioural finance are rapidly expanding fields that are continually growing in prominence. While orthodox economic models are built upon restrictive and simplifying assumptions about rational choice and efficient markets, behavioural economics offers a robust alternative using insights and evidence that rest more easily with our understanding of how real people think, choose and decide. This insightful textbook introduces the key concepts from this rich, interdisciplinary approach to real-world decision-making. This new edition of Behavioural Economics and Finance is a thorough extension of the first edition, including updates to the key chapters on prospect theory; heuristics and bias; time and planning; sociality and identity; bad habits; personality, moods and emotions; behavioural macroeconomics; and well-being and happiness. It also includes a number of new chapters dedicated to the themes of incentives and motivations, behavioural public policy and emotional trading. Using pedagogical features such as chapter summaries and revision questions to enhance reader engagement, this text successfully blends economic theories with cutting-edge multidisciplinary insights. This second edition will be indispensable to anyone interested in how behavioural economics and finance can inform our understanding of consumers' and businesses' decisions and choices. It will appeal especially to undergraduate and graduate students but also to academic researchers, public policy-makers and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of how economics, psychology and sociology interact in driving our everyday decision-making.

Islamic finance has grown exponentially since 1963 and has reached more than 70 countries around the world with the asset size of about $2.5 trillion. The Islamic financial system today comprises a sizable asset base and there is evidence of sustained demand for Islamic financial products and services in the global market, with demand outstripping supply. This book provides a new source of understanding of the Islamic financial products in view of facilitating academia, industrialists, professionals, product designers, students and policymakers globally. There is a mass of literature on Islamic finance available to the market, but very little research is found in the form of book exclusively on Islamic financial products and their structures. Thus, this book is a timely contribution to the global market with Islamic financial product solutions.

This book critically analyses the crisis of the euro currency from 2008 to the present. It argues that an understanding of this crisis requires an understanding of financial and economic crises in individual countries participating in the euro. It goes on to describe and explain the crises in four countries - Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy - showing how they differ and together challenge the euro currency by requiring a varied policy response from Europe. Eurocritical is a guide for scholars, students and practitioners of finance and economics.

This volume presents lecture notes for a course in behavioral finance, most suitable for MBA students, but also adaptable for a PhD class. These lecture notes are based on the author's experience in teaching behavioral finance classes at Bocconi University (at the PhD level) and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo (MBA).Written in a way that is user-friendly for both teachers and students, this book is the first of its kind and consolidates all the material necessary for a course on behavioral finance, balancing psychological concepts with financial applications. Material formerly presented only in academic papers has been transformed to a format more suitable for students, while the most important issues have been highlighted in boxes that can form the basis of a lecturer's teaching slides.In addition to corralling all the currently scattered materials into one book, a neat logical order is introduced to the subject matter. Behavioral finance is put in a context relative to the other disciplines of finance, its history is outlined and the way it evolved - from an eclectic collection of counter examples to market efficiency into a bona fide discipline of finance - is reviewed and explained.The 17 topic-based chapters in this book are each intended for a 90-minute lecture. The first five chapters (Part 1) provide the psychological and financial foundations of behavioral finance. The next 12 chapters (Part 2) are applications: Chapters 6-13 cover the essentials while Chapters 14-17 are special, elective topics.

In The Social Life of Financial Derivatives Edward LiPuma theorizes the profound social dimensions of derivatives markets and the processes, rituals, and belief systems that drive them. In response to the 2008 financial crisis and drawing on his experience trading derivatives, LiPuma outlines how they function as complex devices that organize speculative capital as well as the ways derivative-driven capitalism not only produces the conditions for its own existence, but also penetrates the fabric of everyday life. Framing finance as a form of social life and highlighting the intrinsically social character of financial derivatives, LiPuma deepens our understanding of derivatives so that we may someday use them to serve the public well-being.

Conventional methods of financial modeling are often overly exact, to the point that their purpose--to aid in financial decision making--is easily lost. Tarrazo's approach, the use of approximation, gives professionals in finance, economics, and portfolio management a sound and sophisticated way to improve their decision making, particularly in such tasks as economic prediction, financial planning, and portfolio management. Tarrazo reviews how to build models, especially those with simultaneous equation systems, then provides a simple way to use approximate equation systems to solve them. Down to earth, readable, and meticulously explained throughout, the book is not only an important tool in practical problem solving situations, but it also provides valuable methods and guidance for upper level students and their instructors.

Among the book's important contributions is its chapter on portfolio optimization. Tarrazo helps clarify the theory and application of modern portfolio theory, especially in regard to its implementation with commonly available information management tools (such as EXCEL). He also provides innovative ways to optimize portfolios under realistic conditions and a method to obtain optimal weights in interval form that does not rely on probability; instead, it relies on the mathematical quality of the matrix in the optimization. Another chapter shows that approximate equations are a general-purpose optimization tool, one that subsumes all other known optimization tools such as classical and mathematical programming. Tarrazo closes with an unusually full bibliography, containing more than 200 references spanning several areas of analysis and various disciplines.

The current world financial scene indicates at an intertwined and interdependent relationship between financial market activity and economic health. This book explains how the economic messages delivered by the dynamic evolution of financial asset returns are strongly related to option prices. The Black Scholes framework is introduced and by underlining its shortcomings, an alternative approach is presented that has emerged over the past ten years of academic research, an approach that is much more grounded on a realistic statistical analysis of data rather than on ad hoc tractable continuous time option pricing models. The reader then learns what it takes to understand and implement these option pricing models based on time series analysis in a self-contained way. The discussion covers modeling choices available to the quantitative analyst, as well as the tools to decide upon a particular model based on the historical datasets of financial returns. The reader is then guided into numerical deduction of option prices from these models and illustrations with real examples are used to reflect the accuracy of the approach using datasets of options on equity indices.

Stochastic Drawdowns consists of some recent advances on Dr Hongzhong Zhang's own quantitative research of the well-known risk measures, drawdowns and maximum drawdowns. In this book, the author provides an extensive probabilistic study of different aspects of drawdown risks, which include the drawdown risk in finite time-horizons, the speed of market crashes (drawdowns), the frequency of drawdowns, the occupation time (time in distress), and the duration of drawdowns. Leveraging the knowledge in stochastic calculus, Levy processes and optimal stopping, these topics can be considered as problems in advanced applied stochastic processes, and insurance/financial mathematics.The book also offers a number of applications of drawdowns in financial risk management, insurance, and algorithmic trading, including schemes on hedging and synthesizing of maximum drawdown options, (cancellable) drawdown insurance contracts and their fair premium, as well as optimal trading under drawdown-type constraints such as trailing stops.It is the goal of this book to offer a comprehensive characterization of drawdown risks and a handful of applications of drawdown in practice. On the one hand, the book enables interested students and researchers to learn the state-of-art probabilistic research on drawdowns, and explore new mathematical problems that are of practical importance to the financial industry. On the other hand, the book provides financial practitioners with access to a variety of analytically tractable measurements of drawdown risks, and the insight into hedging, optimal trading and execution amid challenges of these risks.

'Alex Lipton is an absolutely remarkable person. Having joined the field of quantitative finance after a career where he became a world leader in the field of plasma and fusion physics, he has become rightly famous for his beautiful papers on many topics, from the volatility smile to money supply ... He's marvellously practical; one is always introduced to the area with a bit of elegant prose and the papers, though very mathematical, never lose the thread of linguistic narrative which makes each one a story which has to be read to the end ... Part 4 covers several topics centred around money supply and circulation, and in some ways this is the best part of the book ... it's a lovely book and I really enjoyed reading it.'Quantitative FinanceEdited by Alexander Lipton (Quant of the Year, 2000), this volume is a collection of Lipton's important and original papers on financial engineering written over his 20-year career as a preeminent quant working for leading financial institutions in New York, Chicago, and London. The papers cover topics ranging from the volatility smile problem, credit risk, macroeconomics and monetary circuit, and exotic options, summarizing Lipton's fundamental contributions to these areas.In addition to papers published in leading academic and practitioner-oriented journals, this volume contains a detailed introduction and two previously unpublished chapters. Some of the seminal papers in this book cover local-stochastic volatility models, passport options, credit value adjustments for credit default swaps, and asymptotics for exponential Levy processes and their volatility smile.Alexander Lipton is one of the most respected quants of his generation and the first recipient of the prestigious Quant of the Year award by Risk Magazine.

The book contains researchers’ scientific opinions and ideas focused on Romanian Academy Strategy 2020. The authors consider economic structures, trends and possible responses to globalisation and European integration challenges.This volume is dedicated to the recently deceased research fellow professor Constantin Ciutacu who was one of the initiators of the ‹‹Economic Scientific Research – Theoretical, Empirical and Practical Approaches›› (ESPERA) conference and a personality of the Romanian economic research. ESPERA is initiated annually by the National Institute for Economic Research ‹‹Costin C. Kirițescu›› of the Romanian Academy. It aims to present and evaluate the economic scientific research portfolio and to argue and substantiate development strategies, including European and global best practices. ESPERA intend to become a scientific support for conceptualisation and the establishment of policies and strategies to provide a systematic, permanent, wide and challenging dialogue within the European area of economic and social research.

This volume contains contemporary analysis of three key developments in financial economics: financial integration; the dynamics of financial markets; and the information, computer, and technology revolution and its impact on markets and the economic performance, among others. With regard to financial integration, the contributions focus on three streams in international finance: the impact of increased financial integration on credit risk and on the required regulatory arrangements needed to reduce the probability of welfare reducing bank failures, the creation of new international currencies, and the relationship between finance and growth. With regard to the dynamics of financial markets, specific attention is devoted to the complex interaction of different sets of traders with heterogeneous beliefs and information sets. Finally, with respect to the ICT revolution, attention is focused on its impact on: foreign direct investment across countries, competition in the banking industry, consolidation in the financial services industry including its effects credit availability for small and medium sized enterprises, and the capital structure decisions of financial firms.

The fascinating story behind the company that revolutionized the financial world Catching Lightning in a Bottle traces the complete history of Merrill Lynch and the company's substantial impact on the world of finance, from the birth of the once-mighty company to its inauspicious end. Throughout its ninety-four year history, Merrill Lynch revolutionized finance by bringing Wall Street to Main Street, operating under a series of guidelines known as the Principles. These values allowed the company to gain the trust of small investors by putting the clients' interests first, driving a business trajectory that expanded capital markets and fueled the growth of the American post-war economy. Written by the son of Merrill Lynch co-founder Winthrop H. Smith, this book describes the creation and evolution of the company from Charlie Merrill's one-man shop in 1914 to its acquisition by Bank of America in 2008. Author Winthrop H. Smith Jr. spent twenty-eight years at the company his father co-founded, bringing a unique perspective to bear in telling the story of the company that democratized the stock market and eventually fell from its lofty perch. * Learn why the industry initially scoffed at Charles Merrill's "radical" investment ideas * Discover the origin of the Principles, and how they drove operations for nearly a century * Find out why the author left a successful Wall Street career, and why it was such a smart move * Examine the culture and values that built Merrill Lynch into one of the world's most successful and respected companies Revolutionary vision is rare, and enduring success is even more so. When a single organization demonstrates both of those characteristics, it is felt throughout the world. Discover the fascinating story behind Merrill Lynch and the men who built it from an insider's perspective in Catching Lightning in a Bottle.

Recent outbreaks of financial instability have spurred new interest in the works of the late Hyman P. Minsky who made path-breaking contributions to our understanding of contemporary market economies. This book provides an innovative tribute to Minsky's work and sheds new light on the nature of economic fluctuations and financial instability. Eric Nasica provides a contemporary analysis of the relationship between finance, investment and fluctuations. He focuses on the contributions of Hyman P. Minsky and, in particular, on his financial instability hypothesis. He also examines more recent models of financial instability, based on dynamic non-linear systems and asymmetric information, but finds that they are unable to account adequately for the behaviours of agents in situations of uncertainty and for the role of institutions in the unfolding of fluctuations. Minsky's theory of fluctuations accounts for these factors in the role of 'institutional dynamics'. Finally, the author compares fluctuations and finds that they have a similar approach to uncertainty and macroeconomic instability. Finance, Investment and Economic Fluctuations will prove invaluable to scholars of macroeconomics and finance.

Economic recessions, social networks, environmental damage in several large countries (eg. China, Brazil, U.S.), the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2015 and cross-border spillovers continue to significantly affect economic systems, financial markets, social structures and environmental compliance worldwide. These have rekindled economists' and policy-makers' interest in the relationships among constitutions, risk regulation, foreign aid, political systems, government size, credit expansion and sustainable growth. Risk regulation remains highly ineffective as manifested by the failures of new financial regulations and government stimulus programs that were implemented during 2007-2020 in many developed countries and emerging markets countries. This book, the first of two volumes, addresses these issues in the context of the role of constitutional economics and economic psychology as tools for national and global sustainable growth and risk management. Furthermore, this volume analyzes the often symbiotic relationship between alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the choices and activities of economic and political agents on one hand, and sustainable growth, financial regulation and the risk management of financial institutions on the other; and reviews the effects of constitutions and legal institutions on market dynamics (real estate; fixed-income, stocks; etc.) including volatility, market depth and liquidity. This book will help researchers develop better artificial intelligence and decision-systems models of geopolitical risk, public policy and international capital flows, all of which are increasingly relevant to investment managers, boards-of-directors and government officials.

This book discusses carefully selected topics in Islamic banking and finance (IBF) in South Eastern Europe (SEE) as one of the fastest growing areas in global finance. IBF originated within various Islamic banks, Islamic windows, investment funds, Takaful companies, and other financial institutions and has resulted in various global products. Although it is still in an early phase in SEE, IBF has developed rapidly in the last decade and has created a need for research on related topics, from the fundamental principles of IBF to the SCR, endowments and investment instruments to Islamic banking practices. This is our second book published as a result of the Sarajevo Islamic and Finance conferences (SIFEC). This conference traditionally gathers Islamic banking, economics, and finance academicians, experts, and students all over the world who discuss a wide range of topics in this field, focusing on the SEE. Consisting of seven chapters presenting original research, this book is a valuable resource for researchers as well as for practitioners and potential investors in IBF, especially in SEE.

This book is among the first to address the issue of assessing the efficiency of sustainable development financing from a theoretical and methodical point of view. The innovative nature of research is expressed through the study of new phenomena in finance including sustainable financial systems, sustainable finance, ESG risk and individual and institutional motivations of financial managers in the sustainability concept. The book aims to draw attention to the significant gap in the existing research.The concept of Sustainable Development, if placed in an economic category, requires a lot of attention, but seeing the cognitive category from the perspective of the discipline of finance, the latter is unsatisfactory, with questions remaining unanswered. At the same time, the rank problem, its strategic dimension and the amount of financial resources allocated and disbursed for the purposes of focusing around sustainable development, identification of financial phenomena accompanying this category is seen as a priority. Most measures financing Sustainable Development and measures of public spending efficiency are measures subject to rigor and rules due to their specificity, which means actions aimed at increasing efficiency are treated as a priority. This book will be of interest to leading representatives of academia, practitioners, executives, officials, and graduate students in economics, finance, management, statistics, law and political sciences.

This book examines cost-of-capital models and their application in the context of managerial finance. This includes the use of hurdle rates in capital allocation decisions, as well as target returns in performance management. Besides a review of classical finance models such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), other contemporary models and techniques to determine the cost-of-capital of business units and private companies are discussed. Based on a mixed methods approach, current cost-of-capital practices and their determinants are empirically analyzed among German companies.

Cyber risk has become increasingly reported as a major problem for financial sector businesses. It takes many forms including fraud for purely monetary gain, hacking by people hostile to a company causing business interruption or damage to reputation, theft by criminals or malicious individuals of the very large amounts of customer information ("big data") held by many companies, misuse including accidental misuse or lack of use of such data, loss of key intellectual property, and the theft of health and medical data which can have a profound effect on the insurance sector. This book assesses the major cyber risks to businesses and discusses how they can be managed and the risks reduced. It includes case studies of the situation in different financial sectors and countries in relation to East Asia, Europe and the United States. It takes an interdisciplinary approach assessing cyber risks and management solutions from an economic, management risk, legal, security intelligence, insurance, banking and cultural perspective.

For PhD finance courses in business schools, there is equal emphasis placed on mathematical rigour as well as economic reasoning. Advanced Finance Theories provides modern treatments to five key areas of finance theories in Merton's collection of continuous time work, viz. portfolio selection and capital market theory, optimum consumption and intertemporal portfolio selection, option pricing theory, contingent claim analysis of corporate finance, intertemporal CAPM, and complete market general equilibrium. Where appropriate, lectures notes are supplemented by other classical text such as Ingersoll (1987) and materials on stochastic calculus.

This book explores contemporary issues and trends facing Islamic banks, businesses and economies as presented at the International Conference of Islamic Economics, Banking and Finance. The authors leverage current empirical research and statistics to provide unique and fresh perspectives on the changing world of Islamic finance. They focus specifically on to the implementation of Islamic financial instruments and services in global capital markets and how their success can be evaluated. Chapters feature case studies from all over the world including examples from Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the United Kingdom, to name a few. The breadth and immediacy of the research presented by the authors will appeal to practitioners and scholars alike. The global outlook and rich data-based approach adopted in this book guarantee that it is a timely and valuable addition to the field of Islamic finance.

This book uncovers the idea of understanding cybersecurity management in FinTech. It commences with introducing fundamentals of FinTech and cybersecurity to readers. It emphasizes on the importance of cybersecurity for financial institutions by illustrating recent cyber breaches, attacks, and financial losses. The book delves into understanding cyber threats and adversaries who can exploit those threats. It advances with cybersecurity threat, vulnerability, and risk management in FinTech. The book helps readers understand cyber threat landscape comprising different threat categories that can exploit different types of vulnerabilties identified in FinTech. It puts forward prominent threat modelling strategies by focusing on attackers, assets, and software and addresses the challenges in managing cyber risks in FinTech. The authors discuss detailed cybersecurity policies and strategies that can be used to secure financial institutions and provide recommendations to secure financial institutions from cyber-attacks.