Since 2007, the repeated financial crises around the world have brought to the headlines financial practices and models considered to fuel the economic instabilities. Deep Dive into Financial Models: Modeling Risk and Uncertainty comes handy in demystifying the underlying quantitative finance concepts. With a limited use of mathematical formalism, the book explains thoroughly the models, their hypotheses, principles and other building blocks. A particular care is given to model limitations and their misuse for investment strategies, asset pricing, or risk management. Its reader-friendly nature provides readers with a head start in quantitative finance.

In Essays on Capital and Interest, Israel Kirzner offers a consistently 'Austrian'perspective on the problems of capital and interest theory. In the three classic essays featured in this book, Professor Kirzner argues that an Austrian approach based on the pure time preference theory offers an attractive alternative to both the orthodox neoclassical and the heterodox Sraffian approaches to economics. The author takes a subjectivist point of view with all capital and interest phenomena traced to individual multi-period plans. Capital is seen, in this perspective, not as an objective mass of tools and equipment, but as the interim state in which inter-locking multi-period plans have manifested themselves at a particular point. This consistent subjectivism makes it possible to present the pure time (Fetter-Mises) preference theory of interest in understandable terms. Essays on Capital and Interest begins with an introduction by the author placing his life's work in the context of twentieth century economics and the decline and revival of the Austrian school. This volume makes Professor Kirzner's seminal work available to a wider audience in a major new edition. It will be welcomed by Austrian economists and all those concerned with capital and interest theory.

What distinguishes this book from other texts on mathematical finance is the use of both probabilistic and PDEs tools to price derivatives for both constant and stochastic volatility models, by which the reader has the advantage of computing explicitly a large number of prices for European, American and Asian derivatives.The book presents continuous time models for financial markets, starting from classical models such as Black-Scholes and evolving towards the most popular models today such as Heston and VAR.A key feature of the textbook is the large number of exercises, mostly solved, which are designed to help the reader to understand the material.The book is based on the author's lectures on topics on computational finance for senior and graduate students, delivered in USA (Princeton University and EMU), Taiwan and Kuwait. The prerequisites are an introductory course in stochastic calculus, as well as the usual calculus sequence.The book is addressed to undergraduate and graduate students in Masters of Finance programs as well as to those who wish to become more efficient in their practical applications.Topics covered:

This book studies China's Belt and Road Initiatives and the country's neighboring diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiatives proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 consist of two main components, the land-based 'Silk Road Economic Belt' and ocean-going 'Maritime Silk Road'. China has implemented the initiatives by establishing Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund. This book focuses on analysis of the initiatives and the responses from the major powers, neighboring countries and regions.The book consists of four parts: the Overview; The Belt and Road Initiatives and Big Powers; The Belt and Road Initiative and Regions; The Belt and Road Initiative and Hot Issues. The Overview explicates the strategic orientations, connotations and approaches of implementation of the initiatives from a theoretical perspective. The second part analyzes the Asia-Pacific strategies of four great powers, namely the United States, Russia, Japan and India, their relations with China and responses to the initiative. The third part discusses the Belt and Road Initiatives and four regions, namely Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia. It evaluates their attitudes and responses towards the Belt and Road Initiatives, strategic docking and major challenges in this regard. The fourth part touches upon the initiatives and current hot issues including non-traditional security, the South China Sea dispute, and venture analysis on investment environment renovation.

New venture founders and their sponsors seek to create economic value by finding and commercializing new and better ways of doing things. Their common goal, which also defines the purpose of the entrepreneurial process itself, requires a better grasp of the key elements that influence the choices involved in attempting to create economic value under highly uncertain conditions. It also requires a deeper understanding of the consequences of new venture investment as well as the various contextual factors that influence investment decisions and venture outcomes. When confronted with a particular decision making problem faced by entrepreneurs and new venture investors, academic scholars analyze how and why the problem in question is a special case of some theory or model which they know. In seeking to detect generalities and to make abstracted sense of observed realities, academics generally classify the problem in a way that is a natural consequence of the specific discipline- or field-based knowledge they possess (Davidsson, 2002). The explanations that academic researchers provide and the predictions they make are therefore likely to be framed in terms of the types of variables, theoretical perspectives, levels of analysis, and research methodologies with which they are familiar. In seeking to explore the intellectual underpinnings of new venture investment, we have gathered and organized a set of papers that provide scholarly analysis of the choices involved in new venture investment as well as the various contextual factors that influence investment outcomes. To insure a more robust and hopefully interesting scholarly treatment of such problems, we sought to include a variety of interdisciplinary and international perspectives that reflect a broad range of theoretical and empirical approaches.

This book argues that the 2007/08 financial crisis revealed fundamental flaws in how the financial sector had evolved over the previous three decades. While access to financial services has improved, the total stock of debt in the global economy has risen to more than twice the size of global GDP. Financial services now play a far bigger role in all economies, developed and developing, than in the 1960s. This development has produced few, if any, worthwhile benefits. The book concludes that the largely deregulated financial sector needs to be radically reformed. The first of these reforms would be to establish the pre-eminence of the public interest in how financial services operate. The second would involve breaking up financial institutions that have become much too big. Third, the phenomenon of financialization needs to be regulated and controlled. Finally, all countries need to work- both nationally and internationally- towards a more democratized, more robust, and less laissez faire system of socially progressive financial sector regulation to make it subservient to the needs of society rather than the other way round. This Palgrave Pivot will be of interest to economists, financiers and banking specialists, interested in an informed debate on the causes and consequences of the 2007/2008 financial crisis.

Financial Innovation, Banking and Monetary Aggregates reviews the impact of financial innovation on the measurement of money and presents the first collection of country studies appraising the usefulness of Divisia indices in deriving monetary aggregates.Monetary aggregates are traditionally formed by simply summing various monetary components such as cash and balances in savings and cheque accounts. The monetary usefulness, or 'moneyness', of these components differs and can change as a result of innovation in banking, monetary transmission and payment services. To gauge the importance of such distortions and the merits of alternative weighted monetary indices, particularly Divisia indices, this volume brings together authoritative empirical studies of countries including the US, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Japan. The authors conclude by showing how Divisia monetary indices act as a useful supplement to traditional monetary aggregates. Financial Innovation, Banking and Monetary Aggregates will be welcomed by economists and financiers for questioning traditional assumptions about the usefulness of monetary aggregates and for its discussion of the wider implications of financial innovation in the banking sector.

Over the past two decades, China's robust economic performance has propelled it to the world stage. At the same time, the world has increasingly scrutinized China's economic policies and activities. One of the hotly contested issues is China's foreign exchange rate policy. China's current reform and modernization policies to convert its centrally planned economy towards a market-driven one could hardly draw on experiences of other countries.This book provides a succinct and up-to-date account of China's exchange rate policy including the currency undervaluation debate and the internationalization of its currency. It begins with a brief history of the modern China's foreign exchange rate policy. In particular, it highlights the three Chinese policy characteristics; namely, independence, controllability and practicability, and graduality. This prologue helps to interpret China's policy on its currency, the renminbi (RMB); including its recent initiatives to promote the international use of its currency.The book covers the basic theoretical and empirical issues that are relevant for determining the equilibrium value of the RMB exchange rate and, hence, its degree of misalignment. Then it evaluates the controversy surrounding the RMB valuation debate, and highlights the sensitivity of empirical estimates of the degree of misalignment to alternative presumptions.The book also examines the timely issues related to China's recent efforts in promoting the use of its currency in the global financial market. After describing the background of China's recent efforts to internationalize the RMB, the book a) discusses the main promotional policies, including the recent Qianhai project and Shanghai Free Trade Zone initiative, b) evaluates the current status of the offshore RMB market, the level of international use of the RMB and the admission to the SDR basket, and c) assesses the future prospects of the RMB to be a global currency.

One thousand years ago, a handful of dynamic medieval city states developed trade at the frontier of capitalism. Their unique commercial ambition led to the emergence of finance capitals of international significance: Finance Masters. From the 11th century onward, international financial hubs, led by astute and bold merchant bankers and visionary leaders, inspired the numerous innovations that triggered economic revolutions in the last millennium and laid the ground for modern finance. This book explores not only classic financial centers, but also offshore financial centers and gambling centers to connect them to contemporary finance, and it also delves into the unique function of leading financial hubs to execute financial transactions over a wide geographical domain and transform the world economy.The 2008-2009 Great Recession showed that working on fundamental issues such as market structure, pricing mechanism, and games was indeed necessary but probably still insufficient to create the antibodies needed to mitigate systemic risk and prevent the irrational exuberance capable of triggering devastating economic crash. In the continuation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments written by Adam Smith in 1759, seventeen years before his Wealth of Nations, it seems a deeper historical understanding of the key success factors which quietly assembled in the backyard of our market economy can be a useful lifeline. This book aims to explain the widening gulf that emerged over time between economics, regulatory and ethical considerations necessary to a smoother functioning of markets.Finance Masters is also a book about the extraordinary men who led the evolution of modern finance with the innovations that changed the course of economic history. This book tries to capture the salient factors behind the geography of finance hubs from the early fairs in medieval England and Venice to Wall Street in contemporary New York. The development and the legacy of those 'Finance Masters' deserve more attention to reflect upon the evolution of incumbent players and better understand their possible future. This book a must read for economics and finance students and young finance professionals, who seek a broader and better understanding of the origins of modern economics.

The World Development Report 2022 is a practical guide to help low-and-middle-income countries strengthen financial markets for a more equitable recovery from the COVID-19 economic crisis. The report examines the central role of finance in the economic recovery from COVID-19. Based on an in-depth look at the consequences of the crisis most likely to affect low- and middle-income economies, it advocates a set of policies and measures to mitigate the interconnected economic risks stemming from the pandemic-risks that may become more acute as stimulus measures are withdrawn at both the domestic and global levels.

This book offers an alternative framework for macroeconomic policy in Malaysia, derived from the universal principles of social justice espoused in the objectives of the Shariah. It attempts to holistically analyze issues related to public finance, which has been criticized for lack of transparency and justice in wealth distribution. This book explores these criticisms and discusses the principles of Islamic finance that may be applied to macroeconomic policymaking to create a better economy overall. It presents a case for a flat tax system, to make the economy more resilient to shocks, and financing methods that limit interest-rate-based debt contracts and allow greater risk sharing among the market participants on a broad scale. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, this book models the Malaysian economy based on policies that apply the fundamental Islamic finance principle of risk sharing to demonstrate its benefits in spurring growth, promoting distributive justice, rendering the economy more stable, strengthening the potency of monetary policy, enhancing fiscal governance, and improving financial inclusion. The book will be of interest to students, policymakers, financial institutions, researchers, ministries of finance, central banks, securities commissions, and anyone interested in alternative economic paradigms.

This book brings together empirical evidences and theoretical perspectives to provide a comprehensive overview of the microfinance sector in India. The essays in the volume: focus on the application of information and communication technology (ICT) solutions in microfinance institutions to strengthen the savings movement and widen credit access to the poor and marginalized sections of society; present case studies on self-help group (SHG) movements, federations and SHG-Bank Linkage programmes; propose measures for strengthening regulatory and governance structures of the microfinance sector; and identify linkages between overall financial inclusion and the contribution of microfinance institutions (MFIs). The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of microeconomics, South Asian economics and development economics as well as professionals and aspirants in the microfinance, rural banking and financial inclusion sectors.

Top financial scholars from around the world analyze regional economic issues in light of the recent Asian financial crisis. As a result of that crisis, and the ensuing reforms, corporations, governments, individual investors have pursued a variety of strategies to cope with the fast-changing economic situation. Each chapter treats a separate issue and offers policy recommendations. Among the theoretical and empirical analyses collected here are those relating to nonperforming loans, economic restructuring, bank forecasting, prediction of corporate failure, Islamic banking issues, new measurement of systematic risk of delisted stocks resuming trading operations, and the lead-lag relationship and pricing efficiency of regional stock exchanges.

Financial markets are complex. Regulators strive to predict ways in which they can malfunction and create rules to prevent this from happening, yet behavioural impacts are often overlooked. This book explores how behavioural finance can go hand-in-hand with traditional methods to help banks and regulators create better policies. It also demonstrates how the behavioural finance revolution has opened the way to a more integrated approach to the analysis of economic phenomena. This book adopts a forward-looking agenda that takes account of existing practices based on behavioural science. It focuses on how to make financial markets an arena for fair play as a central criterion for securing and enhancing societal well being. It examines how bounded rationality, heuristic decision making, aversion to losses, endowment effects and social preferences may impact financial decisions, thus exposing the flaws in traditional forecasting methods that rely on an over-simplified representation of the individual. With contributions from both academics and practitioners, this book will be fundamental reading for researchers in the finance and behavioural economics. Regulators who wish to utilise behavioural policymaking will also find this a beneficial read. Contributors include: B. Alemanni, C. Attia, M. Bianco, G. Bracchi, E. Cervellati, C. Cruciani, G. De Felice, M. Egidi, U. Filotto, F. Franceschi, G. Gardenal, G. Gigerenzer, C. Giorgiantonio, D. Hilton, N. Linciano, A. Lojschova, D. Masciandaro, B. Mojon, P. Mottura, S. Mousavi, A. Penalver, L. Portelli, U. Rigoni, S. Rossi, Z. Rotondi, G. Sillari, A. Varaldo, R. Viale, G. Zevi

Do traders in futures markets make use of all relevant information and is this reflected in prices? This collection of original essays by a team of international economists considers these and other questions central to futures markets.

This book is timely since the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision at the Bank for International Settlements is in the process of making major changes in the capital rules for banks. It is important that capital adequacy regulation helps to achieve financial stability in the most efficient way. Capital adequacy rules have become a key tool to protect financial institutions. The research contained within the book covers some key issues at stake in the capital requirements for insurance and securities firms. The contributors are among the leading scholars in financial economics and law. Their contributions analyze the use of subordinated debt, internal models, and rating agencies in addition to examining the effect on capital of reinsurance, securitization, credit derivatives, and similar instruments.

A Roadmap for Couple Therapy offers a comprehensive, flexible, and user-friendly template for conducting couple therapy. Grounded in an in-depth review of the clinical and research literature, and drawing on the author's 40-plus years of experience, it describes the three main approaches to conceptualizing couple distress and treatment-systemic, psychodynamic, and behavioral-and shows how they can be integrated into a model that draws on the best of each. Unlike multi-authored texts in which each chapter presents a distinct brand of couple therapy, this book simultaneously engages multiple viewpoints and synthesizes them into a coherent model. Covering fundamentals and advanced techniques, it speaks to both beginning therapists and experienced clinicians. Therapists will find A Roadmap for Couple Therapy an invaluable resource as they help distressed couples repair and revitalize their relationships.

This book explores the way in which the financial crisis that began in the US spread to the economy of the European Union. It takes a critical look at the measures adopted by EU institutions in response to that crisis, seeking to explain the rationale behind them, their context, their development and why different exit strategies were not adopted. In doing this, the book makes comparisons with the measures adopted by institutions in the US and the UK. As the crisis has shown that the financial supervision frameworks prevailing in 2007 were not fully able to deal with the largest financial crisis in history, this volume also reviews the proposals that have been designed to reform the supervisory architecture in financial services in the EU. The book concludes that the EU member states under most pressure from financial markets do suffer from intrinsic problems, but that the economic effects of the crisis have been exacerbated by shortcomings in economic governance within the EU. This work will be highly relevant to policy makers and scholars looking at EU integration, finance and market regulation.

This provocative and accessible narrative recounts the inside story of how a broad-based people's campaign was mobilized and subsequently succeeded in pushing Congress to create a consumer financial regulator with clout. What would Congress do-if anything-to tame Wall Street and the nation's lenders following the financial meltdown of 2008? This book tells the true story of how an alliance of consumer, civil rights, labor, fair lending, and other progressive groups emerged to effectively challenge Wall Street and its official protectors and to win substantial new legislative reforms-actions that resulted in the Dodd-Frank Act and its path-breaking Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Based largely on in-depth interviews with the leading activists involved in the campaign, Financial Justice: The People's Campaign to Stop Lender Abuse taps into the world of contemporary citizen movements to present evidence into the conditions that determine the success and failure of social movement campaigns. It goes well beyond general, global variables, such as "effective management," to show how the formal and informal rules adopted by a campaign can serve to preclude fragmentation and incoherence.

As a businessman, financier, diplomat, minister, and first Managing Director of the IMF, Camille Gutt (1884-1971) was involved in all the important financial negotiations between the 1920s and the 1950s. Using Gutt's personal archives as his starting point, Crombois examines the rise and fall of financial diplomacy as a largely private enterprise.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book, the area of mathematical finance has grown rapidly, with financial analysts using more sophisticated mathematical concepts, such as stochastic integration, to describe the behavior of markets and to derive computing methods. Maintaining the lucid style of its popular predecessor, Introduction to Stochastic Calculus Applied to Finance, Second Edition incorporates some of these new techniques and concepts to provide an accessible, up-to-date initiation to the field. New to the Second Edition Complements on discrete models, including Rogers' approach to the fundamental theorem of asset pricing and super-replication in incomplete markets Discussions on local volatility, Dupire's formula, the change of numeraire techniques, forward measures, and the forward Libor model A new chapter on credit risk modeling An extension of the chapter on simulation with numerical experiments that illustrate variance reduction techniques and hedging strategies Additional exercises and problems Providing all of the necessary stochastic calculus theory, the authors cover many key finance topics, including martingales, arbitrage, option pricing, American and European options, the Black-Scholes model, optimal hedging, and the computer simulation of financial models. They succeed in producing a solid introduction to stochastic approaches used in the financial world.

For some, finance is the enemy: solely responsible for the global financial crisis and symbolic of an outdated model that is catapulting us toward social and ecological ruin. Such a view can seem tempting. The 2007-2008 meltdown of the financial system was intimately bound to the financialization of the economy and its consequences. However, in reality the crisis in finance is an indicator that our economic model is obsolete. It is possible to imagine another way, which would consist of seeing finance as a "toolkit" for building a solution to the crisis.Positive Finance presents a way to transform the economic model and reduce the ever-widening gulf of inequality, while taking into account environmental constraints. In order to achieve this, the authors argue that we must re-envision the allocation of capital in order to support social and technological innovations, to design and build sustainable infrastructure, and to finance the energy transition. Reinvented, finance could become a powerful lever for setting these transformations in motion. This book is dedicated to proving that such leverage is within reach: here, the authors present a toolkit for putting money to work in the general interest.

This self-contained volume brings together a collection of chapters by some of the most distinguished researchers and practitioners in the fields of mathematical finance and financial engineering. Presenting state-of-the-art developments in theory and practice, the Festschrift is dedicated to Dilip B. Madan on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Specific topics covered include: * Theory and application of the Variance-Gamma process * L?vy process driven fixed-income and credit-risk models, including CDO pricing * Numerical PDE and Monte Carlo methods * Asset pricing and derivatives valuation and hedging * It? formulas for fractional Brownian motion * Martingale characterization of asset price bubbles * Utility valuation for credit derivatives and portfolio management Advances in Mathematical Finance is a valuable resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in mathematical finance and financial engineering. Contributors: H. Albrecher, D. C. Brody, P. Carr, E. Eberlein, R. J. Elliott, M. C. Fu, H. Geman, M. Heidari, A. Hirsa, L. P. Hughston, R. A. Jarrow, X. Jin, W. Kluge, S. A. Ladoucette, A. Macrina, D. B. Madan, F. Milne, M. Musiela, P. Protter, W. Schoutens, E. Seneta, K. Shimbo, R. Sircar, J. van der Hoek, M.Yor, T. Zariphopoulou

This timely book examines the authorization of Shari?ah-compliant intermediaries as either credit institutions or as investment companies in the European Union.The contributing authors explore the key topics of this area through differing yet parallel perspectives ? for example, comparing economic and legal standpoints, looking at both European and national levels and considering both academic and technical approaches. The book discusses the common origin of Islamic and Western traditions in commercial and banking transactions, reviewing a period in which the Italian merchants and their organizations drove the rebirth of post-medieval society in trade and law. The editors investigate whether the Islamic banking and financial model complies with the European framework, spelling out the different experiences in single Member States (Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom). Notwithstanding the obstacles to being authorized as domestic credit institutions, they conclude that the access of Islamic intermediaries is suitable and may have positive effects on European integration, as well as increasing the competition among the stand-still operators and evoking the ethical dimension of banking and finance. The book also highlights how Islamic banking would make the industry more inclusive.This multidisciplinary book will appeal greatly to economics and legal scholars with an interest in European and international banking and financial law, as well as postgraduate students in international law and banking law. Practitioners and regulators will also find this book an invaluable resource.

Advances in Financial Economics publishes peer reviewed quality manuscripts on any aspects of financial economics including corporate finance, financial institutions and markets and microeconomics.