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.

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.

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.

The 2008 financial crisis rippled across the globe and triggered a worldwide recession. Unlike the American banking system which experienced massive losses, takeovers, and taxpayer funded bailouts, Canada's banking system withstood the crisis relatively well and maintained its liquidity and profitability. The divergence in the two banking systems can be traced to their distinct institutional and political histories. From Wall Street to Bay Street is the first book for a lay audience to tackle the similarities and differences between the financial systems of Canada and the United States. Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin reveal the different paths each system has taken since the early nineteenth-century, despite the fact that they both originate from the British system. The authors trace the roots of each country's financial systems back to Alexander Hamilton and insightfully argue that while Canada has preserved a Hamiltonian financial tradition, the United States has favoured the populist Jacksonian tradition since the 1830s. The sporadic and inconsistent fashion in which the American system have changed over time is at odds with the evolutionary path taken by the Canadian system. From Wall Street to Bay Street offers a timely and accessible comparison of financial systems that reflects the political and cultural milieus of two of the world's top ten economies.

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.

'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.

CEOs and business owners face an ever increasingly complex world in which they do business. They are making decisions from accessing viable markets to sell their products and services to attracting and retaining staff all whilst making sure the bills can be paid on time. There are thousands of decisions and actions being taken every day by the people in the businesses they lead. Are they the right ones? The ultimate scorecard of any business is the profit and loss statement and balance sheet, and this book will provide the equivalent of night vision- numbers vision- to improve that score dramatically. Unless you truly understand the numbers that matter it is the metaphorical equivalent of trying to drive a Maserati at 100 kph at night with the lights off and looking in the rear-vision mirror. So sit back and relax we are about to put the high beam on and have you safely looking forward into your heads up display.

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.

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.

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.

Filling the void between surveys of the field with relatively light mathematical content and books with a rigorous, formal approach to stochastic integration and probabilistic ideas, Stochastic Financial Models provides a sound introduction to mathematical finance. The author takes a classical applied mathematical approach, focusing on calculations rather than seeking the greatest generality. Developed from the esteemed author's advanced undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Cambridge, the text begins with the classical topics of utility and the mean-variance approach to portfolio choice. The remainder of the book deals with derivative pricing. The author fully explains the binomial model since it is central to understanding the pricing of derivatives by self-financing hedging portfolios. He then discusses the general discrete-time model, Brownian motion and the Black-Scholes model. The book concludes with a look at various interest-rate models. Concepts from measure-theoretic probability and solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises are provided in the appendices. By exploring the important and exciting application area of mathematical finance, this text encourages students to learn more about probability, martingales and stochastic integration. It shows how mathematical concepts, such as the Black-Scholes and Gaussian random-field models, are used in financial situations.

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.

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 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.

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.

Risk management is an often-used phrase that is rarely fully embedded within the business process and procedures of firms. This book looks at the challenges faced in implementing a risk management framework as well as the key elements of such a framework. It is designed for the business professional that is not an expert in risk management and addresses all of the major risks that are likely to be faced in practice, considering the risk mitigation and measurement techniques that are most likely to be relevant. This is an intermediate book and accordingly does not focus on the mathematical elements but rather provides a readable entry text for anyone seeking information on this important subject.

Risk behaviour and risk management in business life influence a wide range of fields in which only a very limited amount of research has been undertaken. These topics have often been treated as if they were theoretically and practically isolated from other fields, the so called risk archipelago problem. What is actually needed is another focus, in which the problem of risk is treated as a central theme. The demand for interdisciplinary research means that there is a need for crossing scientific boundaries. In approaching risk problems from a holistic perspective there is also a parallel need for linking the scientific and the business worlds. Researchers must work closely together in concrete multidisciplinary research projects and in co-operation with the industrial world in seeking out and solving research problems of importance. This book contains selected and re-written papers, and key-note speeches presented in a risk-seminar that Stockholm University organised in June 1997. The seminar, in which 200 researchers and practitioners from 26 countries participated, was divided into four main topic areas: Risk Assessment and Credit Management, Psychology in Business Life, Risk Management in Small Firms and Law and Business Risk. In writing this book, the editor invited eight professors from four continents to assist him in introducing the reader to the different and scientific disciplines and in explaining the need for interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary risk research projects. The book consists of eight chapters and the target groups are researchers, doctoral and master students at universities and business people working in the risk management area.

In 1921 Austria became the first interwar European country to experience hyperinflation. The League of Nations, among other actors, stepped in to help reconstruct the economy, but a decade later Austria's largest bank, Credit-Anstalt, collapsed. Historians have correlated these events with the banking and currency crisis that destabilized interwar Europe-a narrative that relies on the claim that Austria and the global monetary system were the victims of financial interlopers. In this corrective history, Nathan Marcus deemphasizes the destructive role of external players in Austria's reconstruction and points to the greater impact of domestic malfeasance and predatory speculation on the nation's financial and political decline. Consulting sources ranging from diplomatic dossiers to bank statements and financial analyses, Marcus shows how the League of Nations' efforts to curb Austrian hyperinflation in 1922 were politically constrained. The League left Austria in 1926 but foreign interests intervened in 1931 to contain the fallout from the Credit-Anstalt collapse. Not until later, when problems in the German and British economies became acute, did Austrians and speculators exploit the country's currency and compromise its value. Although some statesmen and historians have pinned Austria's-and the world's-economic implosion on financial colonialism, Marcus's research offers a more accurate appraisal of early multilateral financial supervision and intervention. Illuminating new facets of the interwar political economy, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance reckons with the true consequences of international involvement in the Austrian economy during a key decade of renewal and crisis.

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.

This book primarily deals with corporate restructuring through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). It critically examines all functions that must be performed in completing an M&A transaction. Domestic and cross-border M&A's are very similar in many respects even though differences between them also exist. The book includes discussions of international finance and multinational financial management, the topics that arise in cross-border M&A transactions. Given the increasing importance of China as the second largest economy in the world and Chinese companies' growing merger and acquisition (M&A) activities globally, we devote the last two chapters of the book to China's outward foreign direct investment and cross-border M&A activities. Moreover, the second volume includes the case studies regarding Chinese foreign direct investment both in Greenfield and acquisition forms give additional insights into challenging tasks of due diligence and post-merger cultural integration that foreign investors face. The M&A literature is a fragmented field of inquiry. The book brings together important, practical insights from this vast literature in a short, but cohesive form that has high managerial relevance.

The essays in this volume explain how financial inflation shifts banking and financial markets towards more speculative activity, changing the financial structure of the economy and corroding the social and political values that underlie welfare state capitalism. The essays begin with an article that was published in the Financial Times that highlights the problems of excess debt, which emerges when financial inflation exceeds the rate at which prices and incomes are rising. Subsequent essays examine the consequences of this for money and international financial, and for financial and accounting techniques such as financial innovation, goodwill and leverage. Among them are critical essays on the role that finance theory has played in covering up the problems caused by finance. These include a portrait of the pioneer of modern finance theorist Fischer Black. Further essays discuss the role of finance in economic inequality, fostering a new political, social and economic divide between the asset-rich and the asset-poor as the housing market (and asset markets in general) become the new 'welfare state of the middle classes'. A final group of essays looks at how financial inflation finally broke down and financial crisis broke out. A previously unpublished essay examines the limitations of central banks in securing financial stability, while two concluding essays discuss the role of international business in transmitting the crisis around the world, and how developing countries become affected by the crisis.