There has been an increasing recognition that financial knowledge (i.e., literacy) is lacking across the population. Moreover, there is recognition that this lack of knowledge poses real problems as credit, mortgages, health insurance, retirement benefits, and savings and investment decisions become increasingly complex. Financial Decisions Across the Lifespan brings together the work of scholars from various disciplines (family and consumer sciences, economics, law, finance, sociology, and public policy) to provide a broad range of perspectives on financial knowledge, financial decisions, and policies. For consistency across the volume each chapter follows a similar format: (1) what individuals know or need to know (2) how what they know or need to know affects financial decisions and outcomes (3) ways in which policies or programs or financial innovations can enhance their knowledge, or decisions, or outcomes. Contributors will provide both new and existing research to create a valuable picture of the state of financial literacy and how it can be improved.

This second edition, now featuring new material, focuses on the valuation principles that are common to most derivative securities. A wide range of financial derivatives commonly traded in the equity and fixed income markets are analysed, emphasising aspects of pricing, hedging and practical usage. This second edition features additional emphasis on the discussion of Ito calculus and Girsanovs Theorem, and the risk-neutral measure and equivalent martingale pricing approach. A new chapter on credit risk models and pricing of credit derivatives has been added. Up-to-date research results are provided by many useful exercises.

There have been important advances in monetary economics and macroeconomics recently. In macroeconomics there has been the paramount development of the New Consensus Macroeconomics along with significant policy implications, thereby giving rise to the notion of New Monetary Policy. This book deals with the key aspects of these developments and further ones such as money, credit and the business cycle. Adding to the analysis are developments that focus on issues for open and spatial macroeconomics.

Gary Burn examines how in 1950s London, City bankers invented a new form of money and escaped offshore, beyond the jurisdiction of monetary authority. This most momentous financial innovation since the bank note, paved the way for globalization. It was a first shot in the neo-liberal counter-revolution against the Keynesian welfare state. This is the story of the Eurodollar and the re-emergence of global capital. It tells how the City discarded sterling and reclaimed its historic role as the world's foremost financial centre.

This book presents a hotly debated issue concerning the ownership of trust property in China. The book describes various conventional interpretations of Chinese Trust Law submitted by legal scholars and compares diverse approaches regarding the ownership of trust property provided by jurisdictions globally. The book does not directly answer the question "Who is the owner of trust property in China?" Instead, using a social capital perspective, it develops a more practical perspective to explain why Chinese trust business has grown rapidly even in lack of legal certainty regarding the location of ownership of trust property. The book also further predicts under what conditions is the time ripe to clarify the location of the ownership of trust property in China. By employing those sociological concepts often used to depict and analyze society, this book outlines the structure of the Chinese trust business and related social relations in different stages, i.e., the current rapid development stage, and the possible transitional stage in the near future. The focus is on how the social network structure affects the behavior of actors (such as the settlor, the trustee, and the beneficiaries, and/or their potential candidates) within the relevant section of Chinese society. The book provides readers with an intensive analysis of the impacts of historical, cultural, and social elements on the legislation and development of trust law in China. It will appeal both to lawyers interested in the Chinese trust business and to comparative law researchers and social scientists.

This book deals with the application of wavelet and spectral methods for the analysis of nonlinear and dynamic processes in economics and finance. It reflects some of the latest developments in the area of wavelet methods applied to economics and finance. The topics include business cycle analysis, asset prices, financial econometrics, and forecasting. An introductory paper by James Ramsey, providing a personal retrospective of a decade's research on wavelet analysis, offers an excellent overview over the field.

For many academics, students, and professionals, the field of commodities is a black box. This book explores commodities in a holistic manner, presenting concepts from a multidisciplinary business and financial perspective, and offering a panoramic view of the global commodity business and markets. In this book, the author presents core issues related to global commodities with recent data including COVID-19. The book introduces the key physical commodities traded globally and some related issues such as the global supply chain, global trading, transportation, storage, and how to finance global commodity trades. Then, it discusses how global commodity businesses and traders manage global risks related to commodity production (generation or extraction), transportation, storage, the final delivery, and currency exchange. Additionally, the book discusses financial commodities, the origins of global commodity derivatives and exchanges, the rationale behind the birth of commodity futures and trading, hedging, speculation, financialization, and manipulation of commodity markets, and how financial trading is executed in real life. In the last section, the author also discusses sustainability issues related to global commodities and the financial valuation aspects of the global commodity businesses supported by examples from real cases with recent data.

Engineering Asset Management Review focuses on life cycle management of the physical assets required by a private or public firm for the purpose of making products and/or for providing services in a manner that satisfies various business performance rationales. In exploring the wide ranging issues involved in the management of engineered assets that constitute our built environment, this book takes a broad view of the inter- and multi-disciplinary approach which combines science, engineering, and technology principles with human behavior and business practice.

The purpose of Engineering Asset Management Review is to publish research and opinions which explore strategic and tactical issues, as well as technical data and information. It also examines the issues involved in the creation (formulation and design), acquisition (procurement, installation, and commissioning), maintenance, operation, decommissioning, disposal, and/or rehabilitation of physical assets. The range of articles covers all industry sectors and physical asset types (infrastructure, plant, equipment and facilities).

The aim of this volume is to provide a forum for

1. the assembly of a body of knowledge in the emerging field of engineering asset management;

2. knowledge transfer between researchers, scholars and practitioners;

3. cross-disciplinary interaction between engineers, technologists, economists, environmental practitioners, behavioral scientists, and business managers; and

4. the presentation of a wide spectrum of viewpoints and approaches from designers, developers, project managers, owners, operators, users, and vendors.

Fragile Finance inquires into the nature of financial crisis in the era of global credit. This book suggests that financial fragility today stems from an explosive combination of financial innovation, over-borrowing, and progressive illiquidity of financial structures. Drawing on the work of Hyman Minsky, the author examines the role played by these three factors in the events that defined the global financial system during the past decade, and draws on their implications for the emerging paradigm of a global financial architecture.

This book provides a unique comparative and global analysis of the regulation of disclosure in financial (securities) markets. It is written by two authors who represent both the new world (Australia) and the old world (Germany). The authors present their research in the global business context, with legal and regulatory perspectives including some references from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. After every "boom" and "bust", legislators pass new disclosure legislation, often in a heated environment fuelled by politics and the media. Little regard is paid to existing regulation or the lessons learned from earlier regulation. The result is the continuing enactment of redundant and overlapping disclosure laws. Since financial markets are often described as markets for information, the failure to ensure disclosure is at the heart of financial services regulation. This book argues that the solution to the failure of disclosure is a brief, easily understood, principles-based, plain English safety-net amendment to statute law such as "you must keep the financial market fully informed", a measure that would support effective mandatory continuous disclosure of information to financial markets. This book examines the reasons for disclosure regulation, and how the efficient operation of financial markets is dependent on disclosure. It examines the adequacy of common law and civil law concerning broker/client disclosure, and concludes that industry licensing in itself fails to keep the market informed. While recognizing the failures of securities commissions to achieve good disclosure in financial markets, it confirms the effectiveness of coregulation of disclosure by a commission with the support of the financial markets (such as the stock exchange). Coregulation builds on financial market self-regulation, and is best described in the words of one-time SEC Chairman William O. Douglas, who, in the 1930s, described it as a shotgun behind the door.

Money is an important instrument of calculation: as a unit of account and means of payment, it serves the purpose of exchange. Yet, it is increasingly becoming itself an object of exchange and calculation on financial markets, which tend less to the production and exchange of real goods. The question therefore is: has the economy lost its measure?

This book analyses and discusses current issues and trends in finance with a special focus on technological developments and innovations. The book presents an overview of the classical and traditional approaches of financial management in companies and discusses its key strategic role in corporate performance. Furthermore, the volume illustrates how the emerging technological innovations will shape the theory and practice of financial management, focusing especially on the decentralized financial ecosystems that blockchain and its related technologies allow.

This concise textbook provides a unique framework to introduce Quantitative Finance to advanced undergraduate and beginning postgraduate students. Inspired by Newton's three laws of motion, three principles of Quantitative Finance are proposed to help practitioners also to understand the pricing of plain vanilla derivatives and fixed income securities.The book provides a refreshing perspective on Box's thesis that 'all models are wrong, but some are useful.' Being practice- and market-oriented, the author focuses on financial derivatives that matter most to practitioners.The three principles of Quantitative Finance serve as buoys for navigating the treacherous waters of hypotheses, models, and gaps between theory and practice. The author shows that a risk-based parsimonious model for modeling the shape of the yield curve, the arbitrage-free properties of options, the Black-Scholes and binomial pricing models, even the capital asset pricing model and the Modigliani-Miller propositions can be obtained systematically by applying the normative principles of Quantitative Finance.

Sustainable Investing: Socio-Economic Impacts of Exchange-Traded Funds examines the social and economic effects of sustainable investing ETFs and their impacts on the global financial system. The book presents the key issues with regard to sustainable investing, discussing exchange-traded funds mechanisms and categories in comparison to competing investment funds. The book outlines the theoretical determinants of ETF markets development and the effects of their diffusion, both at the investor and firm levels, as well as financial system, entire economy, and society levels. The book presents various possible implementations of sustainable investing, and covers the methodological aspects of their identification and categorization. Hybrid investment products-such as exchange-traded funds that combine the investment features of mutual funds with the trading features of stocks-are one of the most rapidly growing categories of investment funds with their total global value reaching almost $5 trillion. The book examines the linkages between ETFs and the FinTech sector in the context of sustainable development, as well as global sustainable development policies in relation to their effects on the popularity of sustainable investing. The book concludes with a discussion of the significance for other entities that may be affected, such as policy makers and recipients of funds invested through sustainable investment strategies.

Markov chains have increasingly become useful way of capturing stochastic nature of many economic and financial variables. Although the hidden Markov processes have been widely employed for some time in many engineering applications e.g. speech recognition, its effectiveness has now been recognized in areas of social science research as well. The main aim of Hidden Markov Models: Applications to Financial Economics is to make such techniques available to more researchers in financial economics. As such we only cover the necessary theoretical aspects in each chapter while focusing on real life applications using contemporary data mainly from OECD group of countries. The underlying assumption here is that the researchers in financial economics would be familiar with such application although empirical techniques would be more traditional econometrics. Keeping the application level in a more familiar level, we focus on the methodology based on hidden Markov processes. This will, we believe, help the reader to develop more in-depth understanding of the modeling issues thereby benefiting their future research.

This book is an augmented account of Technology and Regulation: How Are They Driving Our Markets?, a conference hosted by the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College on May 1, 2007. The text includes the edited transcript of the full conference: four panels and the major presentations of three distinguished industry leaders - Ian Domowitz, Managing Director, ITG, Inc.; Erik Sirri, Director of the Division of Market Regulation, US Securities and Exchange Commission; and John Thain, who was CEO of NYSE Euronext at the time of the conference. The book also includes a related paper by Paul Davis, Mike Pagano, and myself: "Divergent Expectations," Journal of Portfolio Management, Fall 2007. My co-editors and I have worked diligently to make this book, like all the other popular books in the series, more than an historical record. John Byrne, Antoinette Colaninno and I have edited the manuscript heavily for clarity and unity of ideas.

Industry 4.0 has spread globally since its inception in 2011, now encompassing many sectors, including its diffusion in the field of financial services. By combining information technology and automation, it is now canvassing the insurance sector, which is in dire need of digital transformation. This book presents a business model of Insurance 4.0 by detailing its implementation in processes, platforms, persons, and partnerships of the insurance companies alongside looking at future developments. Filled with business cases in insurance companies and financial services, this book will be of interest to those academics and researchers of insurance, financial technology, and digital transformation, alongside executives and managers of insurance companies.

With today's availability of Social Security and Medicare, we typically think of the older years as a stage in life where people are supported financially. However, of the more than 40 million old adults currently living in the US, many are struggling financially living below or near the poverty line. They are lacking the assets necessary to see them through a period of life that is often longer than expected and that requires more health and long-term care. While financial vulnerability can be most pronounced in old age, it is often created across decades, revealing itself in later years when there is little opportunity to reverse a lifetime of disadvantage. The concept of Financial Capability refers to both an individual and structural idea that combines a person's ability to act with their opportunity to act in their best financial interests. In Financial Capability and Asset Holding in Later Life: A Life Course Perspective the concept of Financial Capability is used to underscore the importance of acquiring knowledge and skills while also addressing policies and services than can build financial security. The volume assembles the latest evidence on financial capability and assets among older adults using a life course perspective, arguing that older adults need financial knowledge and financial services in order to build secure lives, and that this process needs to begin before it is too late to make effective changes and choices. Broken into three parts, the chapters in this book written by leading experts in the field blend together empirical findings, economic and social theory, and case studies. Part 1 opens the book with a conceptual and empirical overview of financial capability and assets among older adults using a life course perspective. Part 2 presents chapters addressing financial vulnerability of diverse racial and ethnic groups, people with disabilities, and immigrants. Part 3 includes chapters describing current policies, programs, and innovations, including a review of important issues of working and caregiving in later life, and a detailed assessment of age-friendlybanking principles, banking products, services, and policies.

With the help of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, the author of this remarkable book spent two decades interviewing hundreds of people renowned for their wealth and achievement. He distills the collective wisdom of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and others, offering priceless advice on positive thinking and overcoming adversity.

This book introduces the new China (Shanghai) Free-Trade Zone one year after its launch. It examines in depth the economic, strategic and political effects of Chinese economic and financial reform. The results of the analysis are further clarified by comparing Shanghai with analogous counterparts in Singapore and Hong Kong. China has developed a number of special and free-trade zones but the new Pilot Shanghai FTZ includes all previous privileges promoting the area as perfect hub for the Asia-Pacific region. This work represents a valuable business guide for appraising new opportunities in the most promising sectors for business enterprises in China.

Household finance studies is a relatively recent field, exploring a growing understanding of how households make financial decisions relating to the functions of consumption, payment, risk management, borrowing and investing; how institutions provide goods and services to satisfy these financial functions of households; and how interventions by firms, governments and other parties affect the provision of financial services. This timely book analyses existing findings about household behavior as well as findings related to policy interventions. With international case studies, this book reviews a topic of global importance and brings a crucial up-to-date survey of the field for researchers and postgraduate students.

"Bayesian Methods in Finance" provides a detailed overview of the theory of Bayesian methods and explains their real-world applications to financial modeling. While the principles and concepts explained throughout the book can be used in financial modeling and decision making in general, the authors focus on portfolio management and market risk management--since these are the areas in finance where Bayesian methods have had the greatest penetration to date.

Over the past few decades, finance has been subject to an accelerated process of change and innovation. These changes have often been understood as a distortion to a self-equilibrating economic system. This volume, however, aims to investigate the financial sphere in the wake of deregulation, as an emergent driving force in shaping the nature of capitalism into the new century.
This edited volume unravels the complexity and fragility of contemporary finance. It explores the role played by international finance in reconfiguring power structures, and explains the inner workings and mechanisms of global finance in the wake of deregulation. It aims to deepen our understanding of the interconnectedness of the processes and mechanisms of financial expansion. Elucidating the effects of this expansion in the global political economy, the book looks at the central question of how financial power works today.
The volume brings together perspectives from political economy, finance, accountancy, law and sociology. Together, the contributors develop an appreciation of the novel constitutive role of finance in globalizing capitalism.

Mathematical finance has grown into a huge area of research which requires a large number of sophisticated mathematical tools. This book simultaneously introduces the financial methodology and the relevant mathematical tools in a style that is mathematically rigorous and yet accessible to practitioners and mathematicians alike. It interlaces financial concepts such as arbitrage opportunities, admissible strategies, contingent claims, option pricing and default risk with the mathematical theory of Brownian motion, diffusion processes, and Levy processes. The first half of the book is devoted to continuous path processes whereas the second half deals with discontinuous processes.

The extensive bibliography comprises a wealth of important references and the author index enables readers quickly to locate where the reference is cited within the book, making this volume an invaluable tool both for students and for those at the forefront of research and practice."