The papers in Governance, Decentralization and Reform in China, India and Russia, which were presented at a ZEF conference in May 1999, deal with three critical aspects of governance in China, India, and Russia: political reforms at the local level; fiscal reforms in intergovernmental relations; and legal reforms. The volume collects contributions from 24 outstanding economists, political scientists and legal specialists including Vito Tanzi, Daniel Treisman, Pranab Bardham, Jean Dreze, Katharina Pistor and Kathryn Hendley. Distorted economic and political incentive structures, capture of the state by powerful elites and inoperative legal systems are factors that have greatly complicated the political economy of reform in these three large countries with heterogeneous populations. Addressing these political and institutional issues is essential to designing good policies. One particular goal of this volume is to bring together new analytical insights and empirical evidence on governance, a new and growing field of research. The volume is divided into three parts: fiscal federalism; decentralization and provision of local public goods; and legal reforms. Part I discusses the role of incentives in fiscal federalism. The papers analyze the effects of different revenue-sharing mechanisms between different levels of government, in particular the effects on regional growth and inequality and the incentives that local politicians may have to provide public goods depending on fiscal arrangements with the central government. In adapting their governance structures, all three countries have been striving for increased decentralization. But the theoretical literature suggests that, in a decentralized setting, second-best solutions must prevail: it is not possible to ensure incentive compatibility simultaneously with optimal allocation of resources and a balanced budget in providing public goods. Part II discusses taxation and public expenditure management both as a political and as a budgetary process. Two questions which the papers address are: Does participation of stakeholders and accountability of public authorities improve economic and social outcomes? Does better governance in the provision of basic goods such as health care and education improve equity? While decentralization is often seen as a way to improve the quality of public services, rule-based governance is viewed as a safeguard against the arbitrariness of public officials and weaknesses in law enforcement. The five papers in Part III focus on the rule of law; the role of the judicial system in establishing a rule-based economy; and the effectiveness of legal institutions during the transition from socialism to a market economy. They present overviews of current legal reform issues in the three countries and discuss various conceptual approaches to addressing legal reform issues.

The launch of European Monetary Union (EMU) marked the beginning of a new era, and its establishment has proved an impressive success at the technical, legal, and procedural level. After all, EMU has accelerated economic and political integration in the European Union and tied the economies of the Member States closer together. However, the performance of the euro, high unemployment rates, uneven output and investment growth, and the issue of structural reforms that have yet to be tackled have raised questions about the performance of EMU in practice. There is a general consensus on the justification for economic policy coordination. The existing literature on economic policy coordination, however, seems far from able to provide robust conclusions about how to organize the necessary interaction of institutions and policies. Therefore, there seems to be a case for re-examining the subject under the new framework set by EMU. The objective of such a reassessment is to enhance the understanding of what type of coordination and what institutional setting for policy coordination can be expected to be most favorable. Challenges for Economic Policy Coordination within European Monetary Union provides an intellectually stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate.

This volume brings together papers, which were ?rst presented at the International Conference on Rational Choice, Individual Rights and Non-Welfaristic Normative Economics, held in honour of Kotaro Suzumura at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, on 11-13 March 2006, and which have subsequently gone through the usual process of review by referees. We have been helped by many individuals and institutions in organizing the conference and putting this volume together. We are grateful to the authors of this volume for contributing their papers and to the referees who reviewed the papers. We gratefully acknowledge the very generous fundings by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, through the grant for the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice of Contemporary Economic Systems, and by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, through the grant for International Scienti?c Meetings in Japan, and the unstinted effort of the staff of the COE Program at Hitotsubashi University, without which the conference in 2006 would not have been possible. We thank Dr. Martina Bihn, the Editorial Director of Springer-Verlag for economics and business, for her advice and help. Finally, we would like to mention that it has been a great pleasure and privilege for us to edit this volume, which is intended to be a tribute to Kotaro Suzumura's - mense intellectual contributions, especially in the theory of rational choice, welfare economics, and the theory of social choice. Riverside Prasanta K.

The idea of writing this bookarosein 2000when the ?rst author wasassigned to teach the required course STATS 240 (Statistical Methods in Finance) in the new M. S. program in ?nancial mathematics at Stanford, which is an interdisciplinary program that aims to provide a master's-level education in applied mathematics, statistics, computing, ?nance, and economics. Students in the programhad di?erent backgroundsin statistics. Some had only taken a basic course in statistical inference, while others had taken a broad spectrum of M. S. - and Ph. D. -level statistics courses. On the other hand, all of them had already taken required core courses in investment theory and derivative pricing, and STATS 240 was supposed to link the theory and pricing formulas to real-world data and pricing or investment strategies. Besides students in theprogram, thecoursealso attractedmanystudentsfromother departments in the university, further increasing the heterogeneity of students, as many of them had a strong background in mathematical and statistical modeling from the mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences but no previous experience in ?nance. To address the diversity in background but common strong interest in the subject and in a potential career as a "quant" in the ?nancialindustry, thecoursematerialwascarefullychosennotonlytopresent basic statistical methods of importance to quantitative ?nance but also to summarize domain knowledge in ?nance and show how it can be combined with statistical modeling in ?nancial analysis and decision making. The course material evolved over the years, especially after the second author helped as the head TA during the years 2004 and 2005.

Sponsored by the American Real Estate Society (ARES), Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation addresses a wide variety of timely issues relating to property ownership, rights, and use, including: ancestral burial, historical record of occupancy, treaty implementation problems, eminent domain, the effects of large governmental change, financing projects under formal and informal title or deed document systems, exclusive ownership vs. non-exclusive use rights, public land ownership, tribal or family land claims, insurgency and war, legal systems of ownership, prior government expropriation of lands, moral obligation to indigenous peoples, colonial occupation, and common land leases. These issues can also be broadly grouped into topics, such as conflict between indigenous and western property rights, communal land ownership, land transfer by force, legacy issues related to past colonization and apartheid, and metaphysical/indigenous land value.

Peter Fishburn has had a splendidly productive career that led to path-breaking c- tributions in a remarkable variety of areas of research. His contributions have been published in a vast literature, ranging through journals of social choice and welfare, decision theory, operations research, economic theory, political science, mathema- cal psychology, and discrete mathematics. This work was done both on an individual basis and with a very long list of coauthors. The contributions that Fishburn made can roughly be divided into three major topical areas, and contributions to each of these areas are identi?ed by sections of this monograph. Section 1 deals with topics that are included in the general areas of utility, preference, individual choice, subjective probability, and measurement t- ory. Section 2 covers social choice theory, voting models, and social welfare. S- tion 3 deals with more purely mathematical topics that are related to combinatorics, graph theory, and ordered sets. The common theme of Fishburn's contributions to all of these areas is his ability to bring rigorous mathematical analysis to bear on a wide range of dif?cult problems.

Computational models and methods are central to the analysis of economic and financial decisions. Simulation and optimisation are widely used as tools of analysis, modelling and testing. The focus of this book is the development of computational methods and analytical models in financial engineering that rely on computation. The book contains eighteen chapters written by leading researchers in the area on portfolio optimization and option pricing; estimation and classification; banking; risk and macroeconomic modelling. It explores and brings together current research tools and will be of interest to researchers, analysts and practitioners in policy and investment decisions in economics and finance.

In this book, experts from across the globe highlight the state of knowledge in intergovernmental transfer design. The essays collected in the volume represent creative new thinking about challenging policy issues and offer useful options for policy makers. The book offers academics and practitioners a thorough, thematic assessment of unresolved issues in the design of equalization grants.

In a relatively short period of time, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has grown into a powerful analytical tool for measuring and evaluating performance. DEA is computational at its core and this book is one of several Springer aim to publish on the subject. This work deals with the micro aspects of handling and modeling data issues in DEA problems. It is a handbook treatment dealing with specific data problems, including imprecise data and undesirable outputs.

The editors and contributors tackle a timely subject, and present rigorous research and analysis to demonstrate counter-intuitive results. In so doing, they reinforce the connections between organization and policy in the banking industry and its impact on entrepreneurship, through lending and credit to small and medium-sized businesses. The editors present a carefully organized manuscript that presents both literature reviews and the results of original empirical research that will be of interest to academics and professionals in finance, economics, and policy. The authorship and coverage are global. One of the authors, Michele Fratiani, has close ties to Springer, by virtue of his being a founding editor of Open Economies Review and co-editor of the book series, European and Transatlantic Studies.

Europeans are living longer, and fewer now remain in the labour force as they grow older. Many European countries have responded to the ensuing financial pressure by reforming their public pension systems and health care programmes. There is considerable uncertainty as to the effects of these reforms - as they typically do not alter the unfunded nature of public welfare arrangements and this uncertainty is itself costly. Not only does it undermine the credibility of public welfare programmes, but it may also distort labour supply behaviour, decisions regarding savings and capital accumulation. More generally there is uncertainty about the overall impact of ageing on welfare and society and the multiple domains in which its effects may develop. Pensions: More Information, Less Ideology builds on the existing evidence - mostly in the field of public pensions - and highlights the advantages that would be obtained by: harmonising methodologies used in the various countries to report pension outlays and forecast future pension liabilities or more generally public spending; defining common standards as to the frequency of expenditure forecasts and the length of the forecast horizons for welfare expenditures; developing European longitudinal survey of persons pre- and post retirement age, providing timely information on a wide array of decisions by individuals and household related to the ageing process and the ongoing trends.

Nicolas Buclet Waste management issues can be approached in several ways. The question of which treatment technique to adopt is essentially a downstream problem. In our view the issue needed to be tackled further upstream. Waste management is not only a technical problem, it is also an area which involves various actors throughout society. In this book, as in the previous volume (Buclet, Godard, 2000), the organisation of waste management is seen in terms of regimes. A regime is an entire form ofinstitutional, technical, economic and social organisation relating to a specific field, no matter how complex that field is. Regime formation is generally a long-drawn-out process, rooted in the multiple interactions of the actors involved. Legislation plays a crucial role but would not, of itself, lead to the formation of a regime. There is always the old question of causality and which element occurs first: the behaviour of actors who constitute the reality, or the legislation that models their behaviour? Besides legislation, other formal or informal conventions influence the behaviour of actors approaching a common path, making co ordination easier between them. In this book we have insisted on conventional principles. They are the real guides for actors within each national regime."

The 22 papers in this volume illustrate the itinerary of Henry Tulkens on the occasion of his retirement from teaching. The volume presents contemporary analysis of Tulkens classic papers on public sector economics. The collection is structured in four parts: I. Decentralized resource allocation processes for public and private goods - II. Environment, public goods and externalities - III. Efficiency analysis - IV. Fiscal competition and optimality.

This book is about bounded rationality and public policy. It is written from the p- spective of someone trained in public economics who has encountered the enormous literature on experiments in decision-making and wonders what implications it has for the normative aspects of public policy. Though there are a few new results or models, to a large degree the book is synthetic in tone, bringing together disparate literatures and seeking some accommodation between them. It has had a long genesis. It began with a draft of a few chapters in 2000, but has expanded in scope and size as the literature on behavioural economics has grown. At some point I realised that the geometric growth of behavioural - search and the arithmetic growth of my writing were inconsistent with an am- tion to be exhaustive. As such therefore I have concentrated on particular areas of behavioural economics and bounded rationality. The resulting book is laid out as follows: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the rest of the book, goes through some basic de?nitions and identi?es themes.

Much has been written about the economic and political problems of countries that are in the process of changing from centrally planned systems to market systems. Most studies have focused on the economic, legal, political, and sociological problems these economies have had to face during the transition period. However, not much has been written about the dramatic changes that have to be made to the accounting and financial system of a transition economy. Accounting and Financial System Reform in a Transition Economy: A Case Study of Russia was written to help fill that gap.

The book presents arguments against the taxpayers'-funded bailing out of failed financial institutions, and puts forward suggestions to circumvent the TBTF problem, including some preventive measures. It ultimately argues that a failing financial institution should be allowed to fail without fearing an apocalyptic outcome.

Topics in this comprehensive survey include bureaucracy, corruption and tax compliance; public finance in developing economies; taxation in several former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe and China; taxation in the enlarged European Union; tax harmonization vs. tax competition; and the philosophy of taxation and public finance. The editor has assembled a stellar group of authorities to write about their areas of expertise.

This book presents 15 original papers and commentaries by a distinguished group of tax policy and tax administration experts. Using international examples, they highlight the state of knowledge of tax reform, present new thinking about the issue, and analyze useful policy options. The book 's general goal is to examine the current and emerging challenges facing tax reformers and to assess possible directions future reforms are likely to take. More specific themes include distributional issues, how to tax capital income, how to design specific taxes (e.g., the income tax, the value-added tax, the property tax), how to consider the politics and administrative aspects of tax reform, and how to combine the separate insights into comprehensive tax reform.

Multidisciplinary economics deliberately uses the insights and approaches of other disciplines and examines what consequences their contributions have for existing economic methods, theories and solutions to economic problems. Multidisciplinary economists should be at home in their own discipline and meet the high international standards of economic teaching and research that the discipline has developed. At the same time they should be able to recognise the limits of economics and be willing to open up new horizons by following new, discipline-transcending paths on which new insights into the analysis and solutions of economic problems can be found in collaboration with representatives of other disciplines. As a result of this search, economic methods and theories may have to be adjusted in such a way that they take insights from other disciplines into account. They may even have to be replaced by methods and theories that have been developed by other disciplines.

Aims to give to the reader the tools necessary to apply semi-Markov processes in real-life problems.

The book is self-contained and, starting from a low level of probability concepts, gradually brings the reader to a deep knowledge of semi-Markov processes.

Presents homogeneous and non-homogeneous semi-Markov processes, as well as Markov and semi-Markov rewards processes.

The concepts are fundamental for many applications, but they are not as thoroughly presented in other books on the subject as they are here.

This book is about public education reform and the future of pubHc education funding. Given the many articles, books, and conferences that have focused on the issue of public education reform, it is reasonable to ask whether the world needs still another volume on this subject. In my defense, I would argue that, although there is a large literature on public education reform, there is precious little that tries to sketch the big picture. Too often, both in research and in practice, it is easy to lose sight of the forest, for all the focus on the individual trees. While such detailed analysis is of critical value, that value derives both from its specificity and from its ability to fit into a larger, coherent whole. Unfortunately, our understanding of the public education process is still incomplete and disconnected, particularly with regard to the connections between research, policy, and practice. This book is an attempt to step back for a moment to get one's bearings before jumping headlong back into the forest. It is my hope that this book will be of value to a wide variety of reader- researchers in departments of economics and schools of education, policy makers at all levels, and, of course, the practitioners slogging away in the trenches.

GERAD celebrates this year its 25th anniversary. The Center was created in 1980 by a small group of professors and researchers of HEC Montreal, McGill University and of the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. GERAD's activities achieved sufficient scope to justify its conversion in June 1988 into a Joint Research Centre of HEC Montreal, the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and McGill University. In 1996, the U- versite du Quebec a Montreal joined these three institutions. GERAD has fifty members (professors), more than twenty research associates and post doctoral students and more than two hundreds master and Ph.D. students. GERAD is a multi-university center and a vital forum for the devel- ment of operations research. Its mission is defined around the following four complementarily objectives: * The original and expert contribution to all research fields in GERAD's area of expertise; * The dissemination of research results in the best scientific outlets as well as in the society in general; * The training of graduate students and post doctoral researchers; * The contribution to the economic community by solving important problems and providing transferable tools.

Environmental issues continue to burden governments and economies throughout the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. Severe environmental degradation is endemic to the region, the existing environmental infrastructure is often inadequate, significant new investment is perhaps decades away, and there is little knowledge of advanced techniques for impact assessment, project evaluation, and project financing. The first two papers of Environmental Infrastructure Management survey available cost-effective technology for solid waste treatment and air pollution control, providing guidance for possible incremental additions to existing infrastructure. There is also a discussion of transferable pollution credits as an instrument in regulating air quality. The discussion of economic incentives also embraces user fees and other pollution control instruments. A range of methods is presented for the evaluation and comparison of alternative projects where data are poor or scarce. Canadian experience with specific capital budgeting techniques is given comprehensive attention. Debt financing strategies are addressed in the context of present-day Ukraine. Finally, an outline is given of a general framework for making decisions about environmental projects, including the use of environmental impact assessments.

Increased financial performance and employee commitment are among the benefits the CSR model can offer corporations. This discussion presents practitioners and scholars with a unique examination of how firms can maximise productivity through the implementation of CSR programs. This publication discusses how CSR addresses business concerns of feasibility, barriers and drivers of internal and external practice; and whether a CSR program is likely to constitute a success or failure.

A comprehensive overview of weak convergence of stochastic processes and its application to the study of financial markets. Split into three parts, the first recalls the mathematics of stochastic processes and stochastic calculus with special emphasis on contiguity properties and weak convergence of stochastic integrals. The second part is devoted to the analysis of financial theory from the convergence point of view. The main problems, which include portfolio optimization, option pricing and hedging are examined, especially when considering discrete-time approximations of continuous-time dynamics. The third part deals with lattice- and tree-based computational procedures for option pricing both on stocks and stochastic bonds. More general discrete approximations are also introduced and detailed. Includes detailed examples.