Self-organizing maps (SOM) have proven to be of significant economic value in the areas of finance, economic and marketing applications. As a result, this area is rapidly becoming a non-academic technology. This book looks at near state-of-the-art SOM applications in the above areas, and is a multi-authored volume, edited by Guido Deboeck, a leading exponent in the use of computational methods in financial and economic forecasting, and by the originator of SOM, Teuvo Kohonen. The book contains chapters on applications of unsupervised neural networks using Kohonen's self-organizing map approach.

The mix of debt and equity called capital structure, representing major claims against a corporation's assets, has been the subject of a long debate focusing on its determination, evaluation, and accounting. Riahi-Belkaoui uses both theoretical and contingency approaches to examine the question of whether capital structure really can be determined. Using a bond rating model he looks at the evaluation of capital structure and the resolution of issues pertaining to equity and liabilities and their contribution to the quality of capital structure reports. The book will be of special value to corporate financial officers and to graduate students and their teachers in accounting and finance.

Riahi-Belkaoui presents, first, the popular theories underlying the potential optimality of capital structure, the most popular of which is based on agency costs, asymmetric information, product/input market interactions and corporate control considerations. He then examines the same problem, first under a contingency of diversification and then a contingency of multinationality and investment opportunity. Since the evolution of capital structure rests on the ratings of a corporation's bonds, Riahi-Belkaoui offers a model that can be used for the prediction of industrial bond ratings. He concludes with an examination for equity and accounting for long-term liabilities.

This is the seventh volume in a series which examines advances in the quantitative analysis of finance and accounting.

This title covers topics that are found in levels one and two of an undergraduate level module where students are studying a programme in the area of economics, finance, accountancy or more broadly management.

In the post-Bretton Woods era, the advent of ever-expanding capital markets beyond national borders led to a series of financial reforms in many industrial economies. In comparing reform cases across different time periods in the United States, Japan, and Germany, Sara Konoe stresses the role of dynamic interactions between institutions and political contexts in determining reform paths. In non-crisis periods, regulatory fragmentation is utilized by financial sectors to pursue their demands for liberalization, though those in self-regulating or monopolized markets resist the agenda of liberalization. A time of crisis empowers reformers to restructure the financial regulatory structure and markets and enables the tightening of regulation. By drawing out key implications for global politics, Konoe sheds light on what types of reform dynamics come into play in the formation of global financial governance while considering the impact of regional-level institutionalization in the EU and EMU.

Financial Risk Measurement and Management is an area of endeavor that has had its profile raised every time a significant monetary loss occurs as a result of the utilization (or abuse) of derivative instruments. However, the subject has transcended being only a subject of topical interest. An understanding of Financial Risk Measurement and Management has become essential to survival in all business activity. Financial Risk relates to the volatility of unexpected outcome or movements in financial variables. Financial risk variables arise generically in the form of interest rate risk, foreign exchange risk, equity risk and commodity risk. This volume provides empirical or theoretical insight on those risk variables. The goal of "Financial Risk and Financial Risk Management" is to provide both laymen and professionals with current analysis, theoretical risk measurement models and empirical findings that will extend their understanding of the financial risk environment. This volume contains findings of many leading academic, professional and regulatory figures in the Financial Risk Arena. The Financial Risk coverage in the volume is eclectic and not encyclopedic. It is impossible to be all-inclusive in one volume and as such the editors included what they felt were an excellent array of current research efforts pertinent to Financial Risk.

The financial crisis that hit a number of economies of Asia in 1997 shocked the world. Financial Liberalization and the Asian Crisis rejects conventional explanations of the crisis as the outcome primarily of inefficient and corrupt economic systems in the countries concerned. It argues that the crisis was the result of premature and overly rapid financial liberalization in a world of increasing liquidity and volatility, and calls for a more cautious approach to financial liberalization, and reform of the international financial architecture.

This volume is specifically designed to assist the library media specialist in developing skills for project proposal writing. Blanche Woolls meticulously covers all steps, from developing an idea, finding a source of funding, writing and submitting a proposal, through managing a resource project. Beginning with an overview of the current funding situation, Woolls moves to the proposal itself. She discusses such aspects as stating a need, writing goals and objectives, and covers topics such as choosing personnel, itemizing the budget, evaluating the project, and reviewing the proposal itself. Woolls includes a discussion of funding sources other than government agencies, in which she provides suggestions for approaching private foundations and corporations. A bibliography and three appendixes concerning project management appear at the end of the book. Included among them are sample proposals which will serve as excellent models for new project proposals writers.

Essays on Money, Banking and Regulation honors the interests and achievements of the Dutch economist Conrad Oort. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 - Fiscal and monetary policy - reviews a variety of topics ranging from the measurement of money to the control and management of government expenditures. Part 2 - International institutions and international economic policy - looks at the international dimension of monetary and fiscal policy, with extensive discussion of the International Monetary Fund and the European Monetary Union. Part 3 - The future of international banking and the financial sector in the Netherlands - is an insider's view of the strategic choices facing financial institutions in the near future. Finally, Part 4 - Taxation and reforms in the Dutch tax system - is closest to Oort's research and practice since he has become known as an architect of the 1990 Dutch tax reform; this part is dedicated in particular to the tax reforms suggested by Oort.

Artificial intelligence is a consortium of data-driven methodologies which includes artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, probabilistic belief networks and machine learning as its components. We have witnessed a phenomenal impact of this data-driven consortium of methodologies in many areas of studies, the economic and financial fields being of no exception. In particular, this volume of collected works will give examples of its impact on the field of economics and finance. This volume is the result of the selection of high-quality papers presented at a special session entitled 'Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Finance' at the '2003 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence' (IC-AI '03) held at the Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 23-26 2003. The special session, organised by Jane Binner, Graham Kendall and Shu-Heng Chen, was presented in order to draw attention to the tremendous diversity and richness of the applications of artificial intelligence to problems in Economics and Finance. This volume should appeal to economists interested in adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of economic problems, computer scientists who are looking for potential applications of artificial intelligence and practitioners who are looking for new perspectives on how to build models for everyday operations.

There are still many important Artificial Intelligence disciplines yet to be covered. Among them are the methodologies of independent component analysis, reinforcement learning, inductive logical programming, classifier systems and Bayesian networks, not to mention many ongoing and highly fascinating hybridsystems. A way to make up for their omission is to visit this subject again later. We certainly hope that we can do so in the near future with another volume of 'Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Finance'.

Operational risk management is attracting the attention of academics and professionals worldwide. Academics are interested in this topic because it provides opportunities for the application of sophisticated statistical techniques, as well as lucrative opportunities for consultancy work and challenging questions on how to measure operational risk. For the practitioners, acquiring knowledge of operational risk is more than mere luxury as major banks all around the world have to be Basel 2 compliant within the next two years. Moreover, operational losses have, since the notorious collapse of Barings Bank, been haunting banks' top management, prompting a strive to devise measures that can reduce operational losses and the risk of business collapse. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that an operational loss event could lead to a fall in the market value of the affected firm that is greater than the loss itself. This new book is accessible to the average banker, while providing a general survey of the work on operational risk that academics will find invaluable.

From the start of the financial crisis in 2007, which turned into an economic crisis soon afterwards, it was obvious that public law could not prevent the genesis of this crisis although it has adequate instruments to make a reoccurrence of such a crisis unlikely. Financial law, tax law and even aspects of criminal law are designed to regulate the behaviour of financial institutions and other corporations. Since public law was unable to avoid the 2007 crisis, there can only be one conclusion: its instruments did not work properly or, worse, were badly designed or applied. Since 2007, a lot has been done from a financial, tax or criminal law point of view, confirming this finding. Regulation has thus been at the centre of the financial and legal debate, but a real understanding of the lessons of the crisis also requires account to be taken of private law. Is there a possible connection between private law and the outbreak of a financial and economic crisis? And did private law institutions, mechanisms or instruments in their current design contribute to the crisis? Does private law provide institutions, mechanisms and/or instruments which might have prevented the genesis of a financial or economic crisis? If so, why did these institutions, mechanisms and instruments fail to do so? And is there a need for new or modified instruments to improve the impact of private law on events that may lead to a new crisis? This thought-provoking book makes it clear that private law and the possibility of a financial and economic crisis are strongly intertwined. It shows that private law provides as many useful institutions, mechanisms and instruments against the emergence of such a crisis as public law does. Few other books bring together so many leading legal scholars on private law and its effects and implications. This book is rigorous, thoughtful, enlightening and thought-provoking - a must-read.

This is the first book in the Selecta, the collected works of Benoit Mandelbrot. This volume incorporates his original contributions to finance. The chapters consist of much new material prepared for this volume, as well as reprints of his classic papers which are devoted to the roles that discontinuity and related forms of concentration play in finance and economics. Much of this work helps to lay a foundation for evaluating risks in trading strategies.

The financial crisis prompted financial supervisors to take a critical look at their own performance.The "toolkit" available to supervisors is considerably more varied than it was a few years ago. Supervision has become more forward-looking, taking into account also soft controls, such as conduct and culture, corporate governance, and business models of financial institutions.This collection of essays discusses several significant changes in supervision methods and supervisory organisations and examines what methods contribute to good supervision and what can reasonably be expected of supervisors. The authors are experts in the field and most of them are affiliated to organisations responsible for financial supervision.

The papers collected in this volume are those presented at the fifteenth Colloquium arranged by the Societe Universitaire Europeenne de Recherches Financieres (SUERF), which took place in Nice in October 1989. The Society is supported by a large number of central banks and commercial banks, by other financial and business institutions and by personal subs criptions from academics and others interested in monetary and financial problems. Since its establishment in 1963, it has developed as a forum for the exchange of information, r esearch results and ideas among academics and practitioners in these fields, including central bank officials and civil servants responsible for formulating and applying monetary and financial policies, national and international. A major activity of SUERF is to organise and conduct Colloquia on subjects of topical interest to its members. The titles, places and dates of previous Colloquia for which volumes of the collected papers were published are noted on the last page of this volume. Volumes were not produced for Colloquia held at Tarragona, Spain in October 1970 under the title 'Monetary Policy and New Developments in Banking' and at Strasbourg, France in January 1972 under the title 'Aspects of European Monetary Union'."

What lies at the heart of financial regulation? Economic principles? Public interest motives? Bureaucratic procedures? Many academics have extensively written on financial regulation. Rarely, practitioners, and in particular European practitioners, have had their say, the opportunity to express their views on how financial regulation is and should be governed. The book attempts to fill that gap: heads of Securities Commissions, representatives of self-regulatory organizations and exchanges, lawyers, have debated on the different issues of regulation. They draw the lessons from their experience and their regulatory achievements.

Microfinance is a broad variety of services, such as microcredit, for entrepreneurs and small businesses lacking access to banking and other financial services. As many smaller businesses and entrepreneurs may not be able to secure credit services, many microfinance promoters believe that it encourages entrepreneurial activities and inclusive growth. Microfinance and Its Impact on Entrepreneurial Development, Sustainability, and Inclusive Growth is an essential resource that empirically explores the role of microfinance in entrepreneurship development and the operational sustainability of microfinance institutions. It also highlights the impact of microfinance on entrepreneurship development in different countries and regions. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as risk management, women entrepreneurship, and strategic management, this book provides essential research for entrepreneurs, business managers, policy makers, researchers in the field of finance, and business professionals seeking relevant research on microfinance systems.

The year 2000 is the centenary year of the publication of Bachelier's thesis which - together with Harry Markovitz Ph.D. dissertation on portfolio selection in 1952 and Fischer Black's and Myron Scholes' solution of an option pricing problem in 1973 - is considered as the starting point of modern finance as a mathematical discipline. On this remarkable anniversary the workshop on mathematical finance held at the University of Konstanz brought together practitioners, economists and mathematicians to discuss the state of the art. Apart from contributions to the known discrete, Brownian, and LA(c)vy process models, first attempts to describe a market in a reasonable way by a fractional Brownian motion model are presented, opening many new aspects for practitioners and new problems for mathematicians. As most dynamical financial problems are stochastic filtering or control problems many talks presented adaptations of control methods and techniques to the classical financial problems in a [ portfolio selection a [ irreversible investment a [ risk sensitive asset allocation a [ capital asset pricing a [ hedging contingent claims a [ option pricing a [ interest rate theory. The contributions of practitioners link the theoretical results to the steadily increasing flow of real world problems from financial institutions into mathematical laboratories. The present volume reflects this exchange of theoretical and applied results, methods and techniques that made the workshop a fruitful contribution to the interdisciplinary work in mathematical finance.

This volume contains contributions on a range of important issues in current financial research. Topics included are - the performance of fixed income mutual funds in different economic states, the determinants of long-term excess performance of the ADRs on the NYSE, the models for forecasting the Euro/US Dollar exchange rates and the U.S. mutual funds movements, the fragmentation in day and night markets, the market reactions of the U.S.-listed foreign banks to the passage of the GLB Act of 1999, the upper bounds for American options, the spread-based models for the valuation of credit derivatives, the empirical evidence on the evolution of corporate borrowers, the determinants of private debt source, and the underlying causes and resolution policies for the systematic banking crises. This is a valuable addition to the research of finance. It contains contributions from key figures the world of finance; and offers broad coverage.