This volume, in the series "Advances in Financial Economics," discusses such topics as the global variation in financial ratios, trading costs of target firms around corporate takeovers, and economic activity measures in nonlinear asset pricing.

This collection of conference papers presents a contemporary insight into key trends impacting on the global financial sector post crisis and highlights new policy and research areas affecting banks and other financial institutions. The four main themes are: financial crises, credit activity, capital markets and risk management.

The continuing U.S. Government's debt ceiling crisis is an anomaly characterized by a dysfunctional Congress that previously approved the budgetary expenditures for a multitude of government programs that now requires that same body to approve raising the ceiling to pay for those same program expenditures. The U.S. Treasury then dutifully raises the necessary cash to pay these bills and maturing debt through selling (auctioning) an ample supply of various marketable debt securities (bills, notes, bonds and TIPS) through Treasury's "Fast Money Tree." Treasury's goal is to sell or auction its securities at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer in order to finance the U.S. government's operations and make up the difference between government revenues (taxes, fees, etc.), and the actual program costs. To accomplish this essential mission, Treasury sells (through approximately 280-300 auctions each year) approximately $7 to $8 trillion in marketable debt in the global financial markets to 21 Primary Dealers and over 200 other entities that include foreign central banks and hundreds of thousands of retail investors through a remarkably fast, efficient, and robust electronic system - the Treasury Automated Auction System ("TAAPS"), which I refer to as the "Fast Money Tree." Simply put, Republicans want to decrease government borrowing and spending without raising taxes to stimulate economic growth, and Democrats want to also decrease government borrowing and spending, while increasing revenues (e.g., taxes on the very wealthy and ensuring that everyone pay their fair share of taxes. This book also argues for a sensible balance between spending cuts and increased revenues in order to promote economic growth. In any case, the "Fast Money Tree" must persist in carrying out its essential mission to raise the cash needed so the U.S. Government's essential government operations can continue unabated.

Since 1990, major banking and current crises have occurred in many countries throughout the world - including Mexico and Latin America in 1994-95, East Asia in 1997-98, and Russia and Brazil in 1998 - with large costs both to the individual countries experiencing the crises and to other nations. As a result, considerable effort has been expended by economists and policymakers to identify the causes of these crises and to design programs with the aim both of preventing similar crises from occurring in the future, and of minimizing the costs when these do occur. These studies have cut across national boundaries, being undertaken by individual researchers and organizations in particular countries, as well as by international institutions. This book collects the papers and discussants' comments presented at a conference co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, and held in Chicago, in early October 1999. The purpose of the conference was to identify and discuss the lessons to be learned from these crises. Topics discussed included reviews of the crises in the individual countries and regions; analyses of the policy responses, both by the affected countries and by official international institutions; what has been learned from these crises; deposit insurance reform; the design of bank capital regulation; the role of bank supervision and regulation; and the future of official international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The conference participants included a broad range of academic, industry, and regulatory experts from more than twenty-five countries. Because of the timeliness of the conference and the wide-ranging expertise of the participants, the papers in this book should be of significant interest both to students of financial crises and to domestic and international policymakers.

A non-technical introduction to the question of modeling with time-varying parameters, using the beta coefficient from Financial Economics as the main example. After a brief introduction to this coefficient for those not versed in finance, the book presents a number of rather well known tests for constant coefficients and then performs these tests on data from the Stockholm Exchange. The Kalman filter is then introduced and a simple example is used to demonstrate the power of the filter. The filter is then used to estimate the market model with time-varying betas. The book concludes with further examples of how the Kalman filter may be used in estimation models used in analyzing other aspects of finance. Since both the programs and the data used in the book are available for downloading, the book is especially valuable for students and other researchers interested in learning the art of modeling with time varying coefficients.

During the past few years all the regions of Europe have suffered from the effects of the World Financial Crisis. Most notably in Eastern Europe, countries have adopted different approaches to combat the crisis and the impact has been varying -- politically, economically and socially. This book gives an overview of chosen countries and their situation before and during the crisis, providing a detailed view of the different regions during this difficult period. It also looks at their current status and the individual ways in which they have attempted to stimulate recovery.

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.