The study analyses the effects of the EU enlargement on the capital markets in the most advanced countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. It also investigates the impacts on the interactions between Eastern and Western capital markets that are due to the ongoing integration process. Therefore, the study should be particularly useful for financial analysts, institutional investors and academic researchers who are interested in the economic and institutional developments of capital markets in CEE countries and are looking for a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the future perspectives of these capital markets.

COVID-19 has spread around the world, causing tremendous structural change, and severely affecting global supply chains and financial operations. As such there is a need for analytic tools help deal with the impact of the pandemic on the world's economies; these tools are not panaceas and certainly won't cure the problems faced, but they offer a means to aid governments, firms, and individuals in coping with specific problems. This book provides an overview of the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluates its effect on financial and supply chain operations. It then discusses epidemic modeling, presenting sources of quantitative and text data, and describing how models are used to illustrate the pandemic impact on supply chains, macroeconomic performance on financial operations. It highlights the specific experiences of the banking system, which offers predictions of the impact on the Swedish banking sector. Further, it examines models related to pandemic planning, such as evaluation of financial contagion, debt risk analysis, and health system efficiency performance, and addresses specific models of pandemic parameters. The book demonstrates various tools using available data on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While it includes some citations, it focuses on describing the methods and explaining how they work, rather than on theory. The data sets and software presented were all selected on the basis of their widespread availability to any reader with computer links.

This book explains the theoretical structure of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and focuses on the application of PSO to portfolio optimization problems. The general goal of portfolio optimization is to find a solution that provides the highest expected return at each level of portfolio risk. According to H. Markowitz's portfolio selection theory, as new assets are added to an investment portfolio, the total risk of the portfolio's decreases depending on the correlations of asset returns, while the expected return on the portfolio represents the weighted average of the expected returns for each asset. The book explains PSO in detail and demonstrates how to implement Markowitz's portfolio optimization approach using PSO. In addition, it expands on the Markowitz model and seeks to improve the solution-finding process with the aid of various algorithms. In short, the book provides researchers, teachers, engineers, managers and practitioners with many tools they need to apply the PSO technique to portfolio optimization.

This graduate textbook offers advanced and contemporary readings in international trade and economic development and provides an overview of the fundamental topics in this area. It brings together many of the issues that are considered staple reading for a course in trade and development and it offers a systematic coverage of the relevant and state of the art research on various aspects of the subject. This includes detailed analysis of important sub-topics such as: trade and labour market, trade and public economics, the theory of the second best, foreign aid, factor mobility, and regional and global welfare. It also covers international trade and labour standards, the informal labour market, and TRIPS. Aimed at post-graduate students interested in trade theory and applications in development issues, this book should also prove a valuable resource for practicing economists, policy makers, and advanced undergraduate students studying international trade. The text balances extensive coverage of available literature in the area with substantive inclusions from new research published in leading journals and volumes. It aims to fill the gap in the teaching resources and should promote further theoretical and empirical research in the subject.

This book analyses the use of qualitative and quantitative content analysis methodologies for risk disclosure practices in the European banking industry. While doing so, it assesses the level of transparency of financial and non-financial reports by focusing on the information disclosed to the public with reference to risk exposure and management. By drawing upon both qualitative and quantitative techniques, the book proposes two different methodological approaches to assess the information European financial institutions provide to the public with reference to the risk disclosure and derivative disclosure in their annual financial reports. These methodologies are subsequently employed to carry out empirical analyses on samples of European banks. By exploiting the points of strength of both qualitative and quantitative content analysis methodologies, this book offers insights into the advantages and disadvantages of these methodologies. The book is a must-read for academics and researchers that analyze disclosure practices of financial and non-financial firms, as well as financial analysts and other practitioners that are interested in assessing the level of transparency and evaluating the disclosures of financial and non-financial firms, especially, but not exclusively, with reference to risk disclosure and derivative disclosure.

From the early forms of loans to farmers up to present day credit cards, consumer credit has always been part of human life; however, ever since the Bible, controversy has reigned as to its legitimacy. It is the history of this controversy that is presented here. Outlining significant developments in different aspects of consumer credit from the Hammurabi Code through to current questions such as household overindebtedness, the authors shed historical light on modern debates.

This book provides a critical analysis of the evolution of corporate disclosure. Building upon prior academic literature, it assesses the most important changes in mandatory corporate disclosure, the growing relevance of social and environmental disclosure, and revolutionary new forms of corporate communication, in particular social media. It also includes empirical analyses that shed further light on the impact of voluntary communication, i.e. social and environmental reporting and corporate social media communication, on managerial and investment decisions. Lastly, it discusses new directions for accounting and corporate governance research on the theoretical and empirical challenges of corporate disclosure. Offering a wealth of relevant and timely advice, the book will help regulators design policies that allow businesses to overcome current and emerging economic, social, and technological challenges.

In this invaluable book, Martin Fase, a notable academic and practitioner, draws together his most important contributions to monetary economics over two decades, using empirical evidence to assert his unique style in designing monetary policy. One of the main themes of Professor Fase's work, covered in the first part of the book, is the empirical analysis of the demand for money. For traditional monetary aggregates and Divisia aggregates the author investigates the dynamics, stability and determinants of money demand on a sectoral, national and Europe-wide level. The second part of the book uses empirical evidence to address a variety of monetary issues, including the system approach to money demand, the demand for bank loans, payment patterns and the demand for banknotes and coins. These chapters support the author's assertion that both the aggregate and disaggregate analyses of money demand are necessary for the design of a successful monetary policy in a European Monetary Union. On Money and Credit in Europe will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of monetary and financial economics, the economics of European integration and money and banking.

This book invokes the Tawhidi ontological foundation of the Qur'anic law and worldview, and is also a study of ta'wil, the esoteric meaning of Qur'anic verses. It presents a comparative analysis between the Tawhidi methodology and the contemporary subject of Shari'ah. Masudul Alam Choudhury brings about a serious criticism of the traditional understanding of Shari'ah as Islamic law contrary to the holistic socio-scientific worldview of the unity of knowledge arising from Tawhid as the law. A bold repudiation of the Islamic traditional understanding and the school of theocracy, Choudhury's critique is in full consonance with the Qur'an and Sunnah. It is critical of the sectarian (madhab) conception of relational independence of facts. Thus the non-creative outlook of Shari'ah contrasts with universality and uniqueness of Tawhid as the analytically established law explaining the monotheistic organic unity of being and becoming in 'everything'. This wide and strict methodological development of the Tawhidi worldview is articulated in this work. The only way that Tawhid and Shari'ah can converge as law is in terms of developing the Tawhidi methodology, purpose and objective of the universal and unique law in consonance with the ontology of Tawhid. Such a convergence in the primal ontological sense of Tawhid is termed as maqasid as-shari'ah al-Tawhid.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg Finance, mobile and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype? A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion'. Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era. Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualised through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

This book gives a self-contained, intuitive overview of some of the most important topics of finance, such as investment risk, market pricing and market efficiency, arbitrage, hedging, and the pricing and application of financial derivatives. It provides a first-principles introduction to the relevant material and concepts, emphasising intuition. Financial terminology, and the understanding implicit therein, is carefully introduced. The books starts with finance in the most general terms, and gradually specialises to investment theory and then derivatives. This book is tailor-made for readers new to finance, such as graduate students entering or interested in finance, or financial practitioners moving to a more quantitative role.

This book considers and assesses essential financial issues by utilizing data science and fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. It introduces readers to a range of data science methods, and demonstrates their application in the fields of business, health, economics, finance and engineering. In addition, it provides suggestions based on the assessment results on each topic, which can help to enhance the efficiency of the financial system and the sustainability of economic development. Given its scope, the book will help readers broaden their perspective on the assessment and evaluation of financial issues using data science and MCDM approaches.

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

OpRisk Awards 2020 Book of the Year Winner! The Authoritative Guide to the Best Practices in Operational Risk Management Operational Risk Management offers a comprehensive guide that contains a review of the most up-to-date and effective operational risk management practices in the financial services industry. The book provides an essential overview of the current methods and best practices applied in financial companies and also contains advanced tools and techniques developed by the most mature firms in the field. The author explores the range of operational risks such as information security, fraud or reputation damage and details how to put in place an effective program based on the four main risk management activities: risk identification, risk assessment, risk mitigation and risk monitoring. The book also examines some specific types of operational risks that rank high on many firms' risk registers. Drawing on the author's extensive experience working with and advising financial companies, Operational Risk Management is written both for those new to the discipline and for experienced operational risk managers who want to strengthen and consolidate their knowledge.

This book brings together for the first time more than half a dozen proposals for an imperial paper currency in the mid-eighteenth century British Atlantic, to show how manage colonial currency and banking in the expanding empire. Existing studies have looked at the successes and failures of schemes in individual colonies. But some had grander ambitions, such as Benjamin Franklin, and offered proposals for 'imperial' or 'continental' paper currencies and monetary unions which would help knit together colonial territories throughout North America and even the Caribbean into a cohesive whole during a moment of imperial reform. This book brings together these proposals for the first time, including several never studied before, to show how thinkers and writers on empire, currency and finance drew on financial practices, precedents and principles from across the British Atlantic to present their own visions of monetary union and the future of empire. In doing so it makes an important and original contribution to the wider histories of monetary and financial thought and theory and the roots of American monetary policy, and the links between finance, empire, politics, reform and revolution. It will be of interest to academics working on the history of finance, banking and currency in the British Isles, North America and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, as well as those working on the political economy of the British Empire, including mercantilism, trade, warfare and the politics of empire in the decades leading up to the American Revolution.

Now in its third incarnation, this widely acclaimed and popular text has again been fully updated and revised by the author. There is a bewildering array of models to explain the volatility of exchange rates since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. It is therefore invaluable that Hans Visser is able to bring method to this 'model madness' by grouping the various theories according to the time period for which their explanation is relevant, and further subdividing them according to their assumptions as to price flexibility and international financial asset substitutability. A Guide to International Monetary Economics is a systematic overview of exchange rate theories, an analysis of exchange rate systems and a discussion of exchange rate policies including discussion of the obstacles that may confront policymakers while running any particular system. This third edition emphasises recent developments such as the creation and expansion of the euro and the radical solution of dollarisation. The book is a concise treatment of this complex field and does not encumber the reader with a surfeit of potentially distracting institutional details. As with previous editions, the emphasis is on the economic reasoning behind the formulae while introducing students to the mathematics that will enable them to pursue further reading. This book is aimed at postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in general and international economics and international finance, as well as business management scholars and researchers specialising in finance. Professional economists wishing to bring up to date their knowledge of the subject will also find much within this book of value to them.

A Debtor World contains a collection of contributions about the societal implications of private debt. The essays comprising this volume are authored by dozens of leading U.S. and international academics who have written about debt or issues related to debt in a wide range of disciplines including law, sociology, psychology, history, economics, and more.
The goal of this collection is to explore debt neither as a problem nor a solution but as a phenomenon and to promote the exchange of knowledge to better comprehend why consumers and businesses decide to borrow money. It asks what happens to businesses and consumers under a heavy debt load, and what legal norms and institutions societies need to encourage the efficient use of debt while promoting a greater understanding of the global phenomenon of increased indebtedness and societal dependence.

Financial experts have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and social media. They provide investment advice, interpret market movements, and explain the implications of political events, wielding a great deal of power and influence through their media presence. How do these experts acquire their authority, and what makes displays of financial expertise persuasive to their audiences? Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world. Preda emphasizes the significance of talk-as opposed to the written word-in finance, as the fabric of many transactions and a means of capturing capital. Analysts and media figures understand financial talk as requiring a skill set distinct from conducting research or representing facts. Preda demonstrates that analysts and media professionals deploy expertise when they engage with audiences in ways that make it difficult to contest the claims conveyed in their talk. The Spectacle of Expertise is based on close observations of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong, a global financial center and a crucial gateway to China, including interviews with audience members and financial analysts who appear as regular guests. It offers new and global perspectives on the relationship between financial expertise and the media, the making of public-expert talk, and how expertise is used to legitimize financialization.

This book presents the state-of-the-art applications of machine learning in the finance domain with a focus on financial product modeling, which aims to advance the model performance and minimize risk and uncertainty. It provides both practical and managerial implications of financial and managerial decision support systems which capture a broad range of financial data traits. It also serves as a guide for the implementation of risk-adjusted financial product pricing systems, while adding a significant supplement to the financial literacy of the investigated study. The book covers advanced machine learning techniques, such as Support Vector Machine, Neural Networks, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors, Extreme Learning Machine, Deep Learning Approaches, and their application to finance datasets. It also leverages real-world financial instances to practice business product modeling and data analysis. Software code, such as MATLAB, Python and/or R including datasets within a broad range of financial domain are included for more rigorous practice. The book primarily aims at providing graduate students and researchers with a roadmap for financial data analysis. It is also intended for a broad audience, including academics, professional financial analysts, and policy-makers who are involved in forecasting, modeling, trading, risk management, economics, credit risk, and portfolio management.

This book assesses the evolutionary sustainability of liberalism. The book's central claim is that liberal institutions ultimately weaken their social groups in the evolutionary process of inter-group competition. In this sense, institutions relying on the liberal satisfaction of preferences reveal maladaptive tendencies. Based on the model of multilevel selection, this work appraises the capacity of liberal democracy and free markets to satisfy preferences. In particular, the book re-evaluates public choice theory's classic postulate that free markets are a suitable alternative to the shortcomings of western liberal democracies regarding preference satisfaction. Yet, the book concludes that free markets are not a solution to the problems of liberal democracy because both market and democratic liberal institutions rest on the liberal satisfaction of preferences, an ethic which hurts group evolutionary fitness. This volume is of interest to political theorists, evolutionary ethicists, political economists and to general readers interested in the future of liberalism.

The book explores "what are the societal interests that may be affected by a takeover, are these protected under the current regulatory frameworks of the U.K., Germany, and China, (and if so) how are they protected and what recommendations can be made for future reforms in the three jurisdictions?" The book adopts three main methods: law and economics analysis, doctrinal legal research, and comparative analysis. The content of this book is intended not only for the academia; it may also benefit the policy makers by providing an evaluation on the strengths and weaknesses of different protection mechanisms and recommendations for future reforms. Besides, companies which are (potentially) interested in conducting takeovers in the three countries may also find this book useful with its overall analysis of the regulatory frameworks and representative takeover cases in the jurisdictions.

This book provides an original account detailing the origins and components of a faith-based accounting system that was founded around 629 CE. By examining the historical development that the accounting systems underwent within the context of faith-based rules and values, the book explains what is meant by the term "faith-based accounting", together with a discussion of its characteristics in relation to various product structures and the underlying Islamic finance principles. It provides important theoretical and practical contributions by explaining accounting as a value-based science rather than a value-free object or abstract. This book explores the way in which religious rules act as a directive for accounting and auditing practices in IFIs. Through which the concept of money and digital currency within the theory of money and how it is enacted in a faith-based context, amid differences of opinions among its actors, is examined. This is an important foundation to explain Islamic accounting and includes how this outcome would shape the faith-based view regarding the new phenomenon of digital currency (DC). Also featured is the concept of paper money within the theory of money and how it is enacted in a faith-based legal framework by identifying two core concepts of today's Fiat money as being a single genus or multi-genera money. This book is not merely an academic work, nor is it a pure practitioner guide; rather, it is a robust work that combines both. It marries rigorous academic research and theories with practical industry experiences. The book provides a clear and concise guide to accounting in Islamic economics and finance and how Islamic financial institutions could meet the applicable faith-based rules in their accounting practices.

This book presents a comprehensive economic plan for Greece to encourage growth and avoid future crises. This book emphasizes structural reforms and the rational financial management and analysis of private and investment infrastructures. This book also looks at the country's production and places an emphasis on revitalizing its technological structure. The analysis in this book includes policy implementation (in the short-, medium- and long-term) across important topics such as sustainability, inclusivity, pro-growth social behavior, and dynamic economic growth. This book takes an evolutionary economics perspective, looking at important structures throughout society like governance, political functioning, cultural attitudes, and growth. With its comprehensive approach, this book is crucial reading for scholars and policymakers interested in the Greek economy.

This book examines the impact of financing on Africa's economic development. By exploring various financial instruments including the role of alternative sources of funding like migrant remittances and illicit flows, it analyses the role of financing for Africa's macroeconomic development and other development indicators such as infrastructure, transport, global trade, industrialisation, social services, external indebtedness and governance. By presenting and examining case studies on various African countries and regions, the respective contributions investigate the capacity of institutions to facilitate and structure the economy's funding activities, and to strengthen the ties between finance and development. Furthermore, they discuss various regional aspects, such as the integration of infrastructure, harmonization of fiscal policy, integration of financial markets, and the facilitation of intra-regional trade and movement of capital. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars of economics and development studies with an interest in the economic development of Africa.

Islamic economics, which is a discipline for studying economic behaviour from an Islamic perspective, advocates comprehensive human development defined by advancement and progress in multiple dimensions beyond GDP, income, or standard of living. Not only should socio-economic progress be in all dimensions but it should also have a higher purpose. A society is considered economically and socially developed if adequate protections are provided for faith, life, intellect, progeny, and wealth. This concept of balanced progress itself is an important idea recognized by the sociologists. However, the same has so far not been measured or used in policy making by economists. Similarly, lack of adequate protections in a society along these dimensions indicates poverty which is another way of measuring slack in development. The chapters in this edited volume deal with conceptualization of socio-economic development on these lines, and show how to measure socio-economic development in a comprehensive way. The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of economics, economic development, and Islamic economics. It will also be of interest to policy makers engaged in economic development, social progress, and poverty alleviation.