This book focuses on the impact of the disclosure of non-financial risk, which could be seen as the most relevant non-financial information (NFI), in the aftermath of the 2014/95/EU Directive. The author analyses whether the switch from voluntary to mandatory NFI enhance the quality of disclosed NF risk-related information and the usefulness of the risk disclosure for investors. The book focuses specifically on the mandatory disclosure of non-financial (NF) risks as required by the EU Directive for listed Italian companies, investigating both the state of art of its disclosure and its usefulness for investors. In doing so, the book contributes to fill two relevant gaps in risk literature. The first research gap is related to the insufficient investigation of the disclosure of NF risks. Companies mandated to disclose risk-related information focused mainly on financial risks, in spite of the width of the definition of risk, conceived as information about any opportunity, danger, threat, or exposure that has or could impact the company in the future. The second gap is that empirical evidence about the effects of corporate risk disclosures is still limited, and the potential benefits of the disclosure of information on risks have not been fully explored. In particular, the relationship between risk disclosures and firm value is under researched, as the risk literature mainly focuses on the incentives question, related to the motives for which companies decide to disclose. The research in this book focuses on Italy, a country that provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact of mandatory NF risk disclosure on firm market value, being one of the biggest industrial European countries that had not mandatory legislation for NFI disclosure, and also one of the leading countries in voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting at an international level. It has been carried out in the fiscal year 2017, the first year of the application of the mandatory NF disclosure for obliged Italian listed PIEs. The book contributes both to the measurement literature, as it presents a self-constructed quality NF risks and to the value relevance analysis literature, providing evidence of the usefulness of financial and non-financial risk-related disclosures in the Italian context.

Technological, economic, and regulatory changes are some of the driving forces in the modern world of finance. For instance, financial markets now trade twenty-four hours a day and securities are increasingly being traded via real-time computer-based systems in contrast to trading floor-based systems. Equally important, new security forms and pricing models are coming into existence in response to changes in domestic and international regulatory action. Accounting and risk management systems now enable financial and investment firms to manage risk more efficiently while meeting regulatory concerns. The challenge for academics and practitioners alike is how to keep themselves, and others, current with these changing markets, as well as the technology and current investment and risk management tools. Applications in Finance, Investments, and Banking offers presentations by twelve leading investment professionals and academics on a wide range of finance, investment and banking issues. Chapters include analysis of the basic foundations of financial analysis, as well as current approaches to managing risk. Presentations also include reviews of the means of measuring the volatility of the underlying return process and how investment performance measurement can be used to better understand the benefits of active management. Finally, articles also present advances in the pricing of the new financial assets (e.g., swaps), as well as the understanding of the factors (e.g., earnings estimates) affecting pricing of the traditional assets (e.g., stocks). Applications in Finance, Investments, and Banking provides beneficial information to the understanding of both traditional and modern approaches of financial and investment management.

The recent stock market bubble of the late 1990s and subsequent crash has made people more aware of the need to conduct practical financial analysis. Practical financial economics, i.e., the application of financial theory to practical financial analysis, is explained here with respect to a number of different topics, with a focus on valuation. Largely normative (instead of being theoretical, empirical, or descriptive, as most academic work seems to be), yet solidly grounded in theory (instead of being ad hoc, as much purely practitioner work seems to be), this book represents a collection of articles that are designed to have useful implications for both practitioners and academics.

Much of the book is focused on the concept of practical valuation of assets, such as individual stocks, the stock market, and foreign currencies. At least partially because one of the most important financial theories, the theory of efficient markets, makes practical valuation analysis virtually useless by assuming the intrinsic value of any asset is determined by its market price, the subject of practical valuation has been largely neglected in academic research. However, the efficient markets theory itself, being based on a general assumption that investors properly value securities by their trading, requires the very practical valuation that a belief in market efficiency makes useless. Within this context, it is not surprising that individual stocks, such as Enron's, and the entire stock market itself, can be effectively mispriced, as this book shows.

This book brings together a set of analytical and empirical essays aimed at understanding inclusive finance in emerging markets focusing on Asia. Despite the significant policy interest in the issue of financial inclusion in the Asian market, there is a dearth of academic literature on the topic. This book fills this gap by being the first of its kind to address the relevant issues and policy concerns relating to the availability and affordability of financial services in this rapidly emerging geopolitical area. The book features a mixture of empirical and case study oriented essays, informed by data, literature and policy analysis that will be useful for both the academics and the policy makers in the region interested in the subject. Countries highlighted in the essays assessing financial inclusivity include Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India.

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.

The co-ordination of regulations in Europe is a process characterized by a huge amount of information in different forms (decisions, regulations, directives, recommendations and opinions), at various stages of consideration. While current developments are debated in the influential media, no coherent overview is offered of the European Community co-ordination efforts as a whole, nor of relationships with other international regulations produced, for example, in the framework of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Such an overview is essential in order to gain a proper understanding of the consequences for the various countries. "Financial Integration in Europe" provides an overview of the core of European and BIS regulations insofar as these have been published in the "Official Journal of the European Communities (OJEC)" and in official BIS documents up to April 1, 1992. This publication covers the liberalization of capital movements in Europe and co-ordination efforts on credit institutions, investment firms, the securities market, undertakings for collective investment in transferable securities, insurance companies and pension funds.

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the modeling of financial derivatives, covering all major asset classes (equities, commodities, interest rates and foreign exchange) and stretching from Black and Scholes' lognormal modeling to current-day research on skew and smile models. The intended reader has a solid mathematical background and is a graduate/final-year undergraduate student specializing in Mathematical Finance, or works at a financial institution such as an investment bank or a hedge fund.

Providing the most up-to-date tools and techniques for pricing interest rate and credit products for the new financial world, this book discusses pricing and hedging, funding and regulation, and interpretation, as an essential resource for quantitatively minded practitioners and researchers in finance. This book will be required reading for quantitative practitioners who need to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in derivatives pricing, and will also be of interest to academic researchers and students interested in how instruments are priced in practice.

The solution to the uninhibited lending that was commonplace before the financial crisis has been to introduce tighter regulation to ensure robustness within banks. However, this solution has overlooked the underlying problem of ethical failure in the industry. In the wake of numerous bank collapses, many survivors continue in unprincipled conduct because ethical virtues have not been instilled. This book investigates the ethical basis of banking practice. It explores the conflict between the interests of banks and their customers, and how this conflict plays out in relation to the lending policies and fee structures of banks. Where such lending policies have a significant effect on banks, their customers and a range of stakeholders, the author investigates the views of leading bankers on their lending practices. The author then goes on to debate the events of the global financial crisis from a moral perspective, and argues that ethical failure triggered the American sub-prime calamities which have devastated homeowners and the global economy. The book argues that American banks and regulators both operated on the erroneous supposition that the quest after extreme profits would be restrained by free market forces. Where banks have a central role and importance in all commerce and hence in all societies, the author concludes by revealing a set of virtues that are necessary for banks to espouse moral conduct. He suggests that these virtues can be embedded through leadership and cultural change, with the aim of developing an account of the virtues appropriate to bankers and banking.

Any financial asset that is openly traded has a market price. Except for extreme market conditions, market price may be more or less than a fair value. Fair value is likely to be some complicated function of the current intrinsic value of tangible or intangible assets underlying the claim and our assessment of the characteristics of the underlying assets with respect to the expected rate of growth, future dividends, volatility, and other relevant market factors. Some of these factors that affect the price can be measured at the time of a transaction with reasonably high accuracy. Most factors, however, relate to expectations about the future and to subjective issues, such as current management, corporate policies and market environment, that could affect the future financial performance of the underlying assets. Models are thus needed to describe the stochastic factors and environment, and their implementations inevitably require computational finance tools.

Finance and energy markets have been an active scientific field for some time, even though the development and applications of sophisticated quantitative methods in these areas are relatively new-and referred to in a broader context as energy finance. Energy finance is often viewed as a branch of mathematical finance, yet this area continues to provide a rich source of issues that are fuelling new and exciting research developments. Based on a special thematic year at the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI) in Vienna, Austria, this edited collection features cutting-edge research from leading scientists in the fields of energy and commodity finance. Topics discussed include modeling and analysis of energy and commodity markets, derivatives hedging and pricing, and optimal investment strategies and modeling of emerging markets, such as power and emissions. The book also confronts the challenges one faces in energy markets from a quantitative point of view, as well as the recent advances in solving these problems using advanced mathematical, statistical and numerical methods. By addressing the emerging area of quantitative energy finance, this volume will serve as a valuable resource for graduate-level students and researchers studying financial mathematics, risk management, or energy finance.

The growth of urban areas and population in middle and low income countries is a continuing trend. Urbanization expands as rural to urban migration offers better income opportunities in cities. This trend is both a source of development opportunities and challenges for the housing sector. On the one hand, housing is a large and growing market, and on the other, massive slums confirm the poor housing conditions in many developing countries. These adverse conditions mirror inadequate housing policies, inefficient or absent property registration, as well as limits to access to housing finance. Provision of affordable housing is therefore an important topic in the fight against poverty. This book focuses on solutions that improve the enabling environment for the poor in accessing housing finance. It explores how to develop and integrate housing finance into a sustainable financial system for developing countries and offers ways in which low-income families can obtain better access to housing finance. This book provides a conceptual framework for housing finance development and addresses practical solutions in the provision of housing finance and compares different approaches.

This book emphasizes the applications of statistics and probability to finance. The basics of these subjects are reviewed and more advanced topics in statistics, such as regression, ARMA and GARCH models, the bootstrap, and nonparametric regression using splines, are introduced as needed. The book covers the classical methods of finance and it introduces the newer area of behavioral finance. Applications and use of MATLAB and SAS software are stressed. The book will serve as a text in courses aimed at advanced undergraduates and masters students. Those in the finance industry can use it for self-study.

Following the recent financial crisis, risk management in financial institutions, particularly in banks, has attracted widespread attention and discussion. Novel modeling approaches and courses to educate future professionals in industry, government, and academia are of timely relevance. This book introduces an innovative concept and methodology developed by the authors: active risk management. It is suitable for graduate students in mathematical finance/financial engineering, economics, and statistics as well as for practitioners in the fields of finance and insurance. The book s website features the data sets used in the examples along with various exercises."

This book provides an in-depth overview of the most salient aspects of development finance. It critically reviews the current state of relevant literature on this topic and assesses both the challenges and the opportunities presented by the various forms of finance for development. Chapters from expert contributors examine a range of topics from the link between finance and growth and finance and misallocation, the relationship between financial illiteracy and lack of legal titles on access to finance, to the role of governments in the financial system and the role of overseas development assistance, remittances, microfinance, foreign direct investment (FDI) and stock exchanges on development. This book offers a good point of reference for postgraduate and PhD students and will appeal to researchers in this field.

Bruce Gauthier was strung along for years as a child and told to believe in Santa Claus. There were whispers about a big payout on Christmas Day, but it really all just a lie. As an adult, he realized that those who tell you to rely on the stock market for retirement are just like the people who lie about the man in the big red suit. The only difference is that the stakes are much higher. Take a journey with the author as he shares his personal experiences with money and helps you: understand how the privileged few take your money out of the stock market for their benefit-just like a thief who steals presents from under a Christmas tree; recognize the absurdities of a financial world that actually makes it hard to build a retirement nest egg; avoid fraud and bad advice that could lead you toward financial ruin. "Santa Claus Is Alive and Well and Living on Wall Street" is not for financiers, brokers, investment advisers, or anyone with access to inside information from Wall Street. Instead, it's for the everyday worker who wants to build their retirement savings.

A crucial issue in the era of globalization and internationalization, is whether the relationship between investment and finance is beneficial to growth and development. Similar questions have been raised about education and its rate of social return; is education necessary for improving the skill of the workforce, or does it serve primarily to facilitate the adoption of these new technologies? This book brings together a case of leading international scholars to analyze the importance of education, research, and human capital and the impact of financial systems on growth and development.

The Bachelier Society for Mathematical Finance, founded in 1996, held its 1st World Congress in Paris on June 28 to July 1, 2000, thus coinciding in time with the centenary of the thesis defence of Louis Bachelier. In his thesis Bachelier introduced Brownian motion as a tool for the analysis of financial markets as well as the exact definition of options, and this is widely considered the keystone for the emergence of mathematical finance as a scientific discipline. The prestigious list of plenary speakers in Paris included 2 Nobel laureates, Paul Samuelson and Robert Merton. Over 130 further selected talks were given in 3 parallel sessions, all well attended by the over 500 participants who registered from all continents.

Greece's New Political Economy traces the course of Greece from a postwar developmental state to its current participation in the Euro-zone. Taking an innovative comparative approach, George Pagoulatos examines the political economy of financial interventionism and liberalization, banking politics, relations between the government and central bank, the winners and losers of financial reform, the effects of globalization and EMU, and the implications of the new economic role of the state.

This introductory text is devoted to exposing the underlying nature of price formation in financial markets as a predominantly sociological phenomenon that relates individual decision-making to emergent and co-evolving social and financial structures.

Two different levels of this sociological influence are considered: First, we examine how price formation results from the social dynamics of interacting individuals, where interaction occurs either through the price or by direct communication. Then the same processes are revisited and examined at the level of larger groups of individuals.

In this book, models of both levels of socio-finance are presented, and it is shown, in particular, how complexity theory provides the conceptual and methodological tools needed to understand and describe such phenomena. Accordingly, readers are first given a broad introduction to the standard economic theory of rational financial markets and will come to understand its shortcomings with the help of concrete examples. Complexity theory is then introduced in order to properly account for behavioral decision-making and match the observed market dynamics.

This book is conceived as a primer for newcomers to the field, as well as for practitioners seeking new insights into the field of complexity science applied to socio-economic systems in general, and financial markets and price formation in particular.