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.

This book explores China's private lending market from historical, economic, legal, and regulatory perspectives. Private lending refers to moneylending agreements between business borrowers and their debt investors without the involvement of banks. In China, it remains difficult for private entrepreneurs to obtain sufficient loans from state-owned banks. Thus, private lending has been a vital alternative financing channel for over 80 million businesses which are reliant on private funds as their major source of operating capital. The market volume of private financing stands at 5 trillion yuan ($783bn), making it one of the largest shadow banking systems in the world. Despite the wide popularity and systemic importance of private lending activities, they have remained outside of the official regulatory framework, leading to extra financial risks. In 2011, China's private lending sector encountered a severe financial crisis, as thousands of business borrowers failed to repay debts and fell into bankruptcy. Lots of bosses who found it impossible to liquidate debts ran away to hide from creditors. The financial turmoil has caused substantial monetary losses for investors across the country, which triggered social unrest and undermined the financial stability. This book is a timely work intended to demystify China's private lending market by investigating its historical development, operating mechanism, and special characteristics. It evaluates the causes and effects of the latest financial crisis by considering a number of real cases relating to helpless investors and runaway bosses. It conducts an in-depth doctrinal analysis of Chinese laws and regulations regarding private lending transactions. It also examines China's ongoing financial reform to bring underground lending activities under official supervision. Finally, the book points out future development paths for the private lending market. It offers suggestions for global policymakers devising an effective regulatory framework for shadow banking. It appeals to researchers, lecturers, and students in several fields, including law, business, finance, political economy, public policy, and China study.

'Dennis BuchananaEURO (TM)s text clearly shows how an understanding of the complementary disciplines of geoscience, conventional engineering and advanced financial engineering is essential to making the right decisions concerning how to appraise a resource or project and how to structure the funding of natural resources assets in order to mitigate technical and financial risk and to maximise value for owners. Crucially, the book also looks at how other sources of capital, such as limited recourse lenders, appraise metals and energy assets. Such an understanding is essential to optimising the capital structure and valuation of natural resources assets ... The advanced methodologies revealed in Dennis BuchananaEURO (TM)s book will have great value to those working in the technical and financial functions, or to those spanning both functions, of the natural resources industry. 'Mineral EconomicsGiven the design component it involves, financial engineering should be considered equal to conventional engineering. By adopting this complementary approach, financial models can be used to identify how and why timing is critical in optimizing return on investment and to demonstrate how financial engineering can enhance returns to investors. Metals and Energy Finance capitalizes on this approach, and identifies and examines the investment opportunities offered across the extractive industry's cycle, from exploration through evaluation, pre-production development, development and production. The textbook also addresses the similarities of a range of natural resource projects, whether minerals or petroleum, while at the same time identifying their key differences.This new edition has been comprehensively revised with a new chapter on Quantitative Finance and three additional case studies. Contemporary themes in the revised edition include the current focus on the transition from open pit to underground mining as well as the role of real option valuations applied to marginal projects that may have value in the future.This innovative textbook is clear and concise in its approach. Both authors have extensive experience within the academic environment at a senior level as well as track records of hands-on participation in projects within the natural resources and financial services sectors. Metals and Energy Finance will be invaluable to both professionals and graduate students working in the field of mineral and petroleum business management.

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 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.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is intended to radically increase investment and integration along a series of land and maritime routes. As the initiative involves more than 100 countries or international organizations and huge amounts of infrastructure construction, cooperation between many different markets is essential to its success. Cheung and Hong have edited a collection of essays that, between them, examine a range of practical issues facing the BRI and how those issues are being addressed in a range of countries. Such challenges include managing financing and investment, ensuring infrastructure connectivity, and handling the necessary e-commerce and physical logistics. Emphasizing the role of Hong Kong as an intermediary and enabler in the process, this book attempts to tackle the key practical challenges facing the BRI and anticipate how these challenges will affect the initiative's further development. The book provides a holistic and international approach to understanding the implementation of the BRI and its implications for the future economic integration of this huge region. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780429467172_oachapter5.pdf

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.

Over the course of the last ten years the issue of debt has become a serious problem that threatens to destroy the global socio-economic system and ruin the everyday lives of millions of people. This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness. The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstract processes of financialisation taking place globally. Showing how debt functions on the level of both macro- and microeconomics, the book also provides a more holistic perspective, with accounts that span sociological, cultural, and economic forms of analysis.

Although microcredit programmes have long been considered efficient development tools, many forms of debt-induced distress have emerged in their wake. This has brought to light the problem of over-indebtedness, a topic which has been previously underexplored in the literature. This new book, from a group of leading scholars, explores the manifestations, scale, and economic and social implications of household over-indebtedness in areas conventionally considered as financially excluded. The book approaches debt not only as a financial transaction, but also as a form of social bond, and offers a socioeconomic analysis of over-indebtedness. The volume puts forward a broad definition of over-indebtedness, highlighting its situational and semantic complexity and diversity. It provides a close analysis of local conceptions of debt and over-indebtedness, highlighting frameworks of calculation and the constant renegotiation of their boundaries. On top of this, it looks far beyond microcredit to examine all the financial practices that individuals juggle. The volume argues that over-indebtedness has more to do with social inequalities than financial illiteracy, and should therefore be understood in the light of global trends of financialization. It also reveals the ambiguity of "financial inclusion" policies, and in many respects questions the actions of new credit providers. This book will be valuable reading for students, researchers and policy makers interested in microfinance and development issues.

This volume provides a comprehensive study of Turkey's financial transformation into one of the most dynamic, if not trouble-free, emerging capitalisms. While this financial evolution has underwritten Turkey's dramatic economic growth, it has done so without ameliorating the persistently exploitative and unequal social structures that characterize neoliberalism today. This edited volume, written by an interdisciplinary range of political economists, critically examines Turkey's financial transformation, contributing to debates on the nature of peripheral financialization. Eschewing economistic interpretations, The Political Economy of Financial Transformation in Turkey underscores both the quantitative significance of exponential growth in financial flows and investments, and the qualitative importance of the state's institutional restructuring around financial imperatives. The book presents today's reality as historically rooted. By understanding the choices made under the new Republic (from 1923 onwards), one can better locate the changes launched as a newly liberalizing society (since 1980). Likewise, the decisions made in response to Turkey's 2001 financial crisis spurred a tectonic break in state-market-society financial relations. The waves of change have reached far and wide: from corporate strategies of accumulation and growth to small- and medium-sized enterprises' strategies of financial survival; from how finance has penetrated the provisioning of housing to how households have become financialized. Put together, one grasps the complexity and historicity of the power of contemporary finance. One also sees that the changes made have not been class-neutral, but have entailed elevating the interests of major capital groups, particularly financial capital, above the interests of the poor and workers in Turkey. Nor are these changes constrained to its national borders, as what transpires domestically contributes to the making of a financialized world market. Through this 'Made in Turkey' approach the contributions in this volume thus challenge dominant understandings of financialization, which are derived from the advanced capitalisms, by sharing the specificity of emerging capitalisms such as Turkey.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this Element the authors review the technique of the change of numeraire in the martingale approach to option pricing. Their intention is to present a reader friendly explanation of the technique itself, and illustrate how it is applied in various fields of quantitative finance as the basis for building option valuation models. They start with an informal review of Girsanov's theorem, followed by a brief summary of the basic concepts of the arbitrage free pricing, and the technique of change of numeraire. This is followed by a number of applications of the change of numeraire technique including interest rate models, FX quanto adjustments, credit risk modeling, mortgage backed securities, and CMS rates.

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.

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.