Electronic payment is the economic backbone of all e-commerce transactions. This book covers the major subjects related to e-payment such as, for example, public key infrastructure, smart cards, payment agents, digital cash, SET protocols, and micro-payment. Its first part covers the infrastructure for secure e-payment over the Internet, whereas in the second part a variety of e-payment methods and systems are described. This edited volume offers a well-written and sound technical overview of the state of the art in e-payment for e-business developers, graduate students, and consultants. It is also ideally suited for classes and training courses in e-commerce or e-payment.

A Spiral Approach to Financial Mathematics lays a foundation of intuitive analysis of financial concepts early in the course, followed by a more detailed and nuanced treatment in later chapters. It introduces major financial concepts through real situations, integrates active learning, student focused explorations and examples with Excel spreadsheets and straightforward financial calculations. It is organized so sections can be read independently or through in-class guided-discovery activities and/or interactive lectures. Focusing on conceptual understanding to maximize comprehension and retention, using modern financial analysis tools and utilizing active learning, the book offers a modern approach that eliminates tedious and time-consuming calculations initially without underestimating the ability of readers.

Success in today's sophisticated financial markets depends on a firm understanding of key financial concepts and mathematical techniques. "Mastering Financial Calculations" explains them in a clear, comprehensive way -- so even if your mathematical background is limited, you'll thoroughly grasp what you need to know.

"Mastering Financial Calculations" starts by introducing the fundamentals of financial market arithmetic, including the core concepts of discounting, net present value, effective yields, and cash flow analysis. Next, walk step-by-step through the essential calculations and financial techniques behind money markets and futures, zero-coupon analysis, interest rate and currency swaps, bonds, foreign exchange, options, and more. Making use of many worked examples and practical exercises, the book explains challenging concepts such as forward pricing, duration analysis, swap valuation, and option pricing - all with exceptional clarity.

Whether you are a trader, fund manager, corporate treasurer, programmer, accountant, risk manager, or market student, you'll gain the ability to manipulate and apply these techniques with speed and confidence.

For the large number of developing countries undergoing significant structural transformations, one of the most important and controversial adjustment areas is that of the financial markets. Focusing on the role of the institutional and enabling environment within which financial reform occurs and on the integration of principles of finance with more macroeconomic approaches to the subject, the book contains case studies of reform experiences in Argentina, India, Nigeria, Turkey and Uruguay. Themes studied include the 'go slow' versus 'big bang' approach and the particular problem of bank-firm inter-linkages in Eastern Europe.

"How did Sweden go from a financially backward country to one with a well functioning financial system? Why did this financial revolution occur after the mid-nineteenth century and not before? This book discusses the role of politics and economics in this change and what it means for economic development, market integration and financial crises"--Provided by publisher.

This book collects selected articles addressing several currently debated issues in the field of international macroeconomics. They focus on the role of the central banks in the debate on how to come to terms with the long-term decline in productivity growth, insufficient aggregate demand, high economic uncertainty and growing inequalities following the global financial crisis. Central banks are of considerable importance in this debate since understanding the sluggishness of the recovery process as well as its implications for the natural interest rate are key to assessing output gaps and the monetary policy stance. The authors argue that a more dynamic domestic and external aggregate demand helps to raise the inflation rate, easing the constraint deriving from the zero lower bound and allowing monetary policy to depart from its current ultra-accommodative position. Beyond macroeconomic factors, the book also discusses a supportive financial environment as a precondition for the rebound of global economic activity, stressing that understanding capital flows is a prerequisite for economic-policy decisions.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the latest econometric methods for studying the dynamics of macroeconomic and financial time series. It examines alternative methodological approaches and concepts, including quantile spectra and co-spectra, and explores topics such as non-linear and non-stationary behavior, stochastic volatility models, and the econometrics of commodity markets and globalization. Furthermore, it demonstrates the application of recent techniques in various fields: in the frequency domain, in the analysis of persistent dynamics, in the estimation of state space models and new classes of volatility models. The book is divided into two parts: The first part applies econometrics to the field of macroeconomics, discussing trend/cycle decomposition, growth analysis, monetary policy and international trade. The second part applies econometrics to a wide range of topics in financial economics, including price dynamics in equity, commodity and foreign exchange markets and portfolio analysis. The book is essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in government and financial institutions interested in applying recent econometric time series methods to financial and economic data.

This book addresses contemporary empirical issues in Islamic stock markets including volatility, efficiency and Sukuk defaults. The studies contained within this book consider a combination of pure Islamic stock markets and comparative studies, with reference to their conventional counterparts. The authors provide up-to-date, robust, accurate, reliable empirical enquiries addressing current issues of stock markets as well as providing up to date information and statistics to support future development and research. The book also covers a chapter on the current trends in research in Islamic capital markets, which analyses some recent and leading works to highlight and indicate the gaps in research that require further exploration. This book will be of value to all those who wish to gain a more thorough understanding of research in Islamic capital markets and the major topics in the field.

The clarity and guidance valuation analysts have been thirsting for The business appraisal community regularly names the valuation of pass-through entities as a major issue of concern. Courts, appraisers, and the IRS have long been at odds on the topic, and the contention within the appraisal community itself over methods and inputs further complicates the issue. Valuing Pass-Through Entities provides clarity for the analyst tasked with valuation, offering clear explanations of the different perspectives and approaches to the process. Valuing Pass-Through Entities cuts through the chatter to: * Explain the advantages and limitations of different types of pass-through entities * Analyze the different viewpoints currently dividing the appraisal community * Gain a fresh perspective on landmark cases * Explain how to properly utilize a court-tested model * Examine detailed sensitivity analyses of different inputs under the income and market approaches The book includes illustrative examples, templates, and a useful technical supplement, plus case studies that demonstrate the real-world effects of various pass-through entity valuation methods and inputs. Detailed analyses and an easy-to-apply model simplify the process while positively affecting outcomes. The companion website provides the text of landmark court decisions, a blog featuring industry trends and tidbits, additional articles, and the insight of the author and other industry leaders. Valuation requires the successful juggling of multiple variables, many of which can have a major impact on value. Analysts need to know how to balance each factor and apply the appropriate rates and discounts, but a lack of standard practice often leaves the issue too subjective. Valuing Pass-Through Entities clears the air, providing real-world guidelines and tools.

The Black Scholes option pricing model is the first and by far the best-known continuous-time mathematical model used in mathematical finance. Here, it provides a sufficiently complex, yet tractable, testbed for exploring the basic methodology of option pricing. The discussion of extended markets, the careful attention paid to the requirements for admissible trading strategies, the development of pricing formulae for many widely traded instruments and the additional complications offered by multi-stock models will appeal to a wide class of instructors. Students, practitioners and researchers alike will benefit from the book's rigorous, but unfussy, approach to technical issues. It highlights potential pitfalls, gives clear motivation for results and techniques and includes carefully chosen examples and exercises, all of which make it suitable for self-study.

This book focuses specifically on the key results in stochastic processes that have become essential for finance practitioners to understand. The authors study the Wiener process and Ito integrals in some detail, with a focus on results needed for the Black-Scholes option pricing model. After developing the required martingale properties of this process, the construction of the integral and the Ito formula (proved in detail) become the centrepiece, both for theory and applications, and to provide concrete examples of stochastic differential equations used in finance. Finally, proofs of the existence, uniqueness and the Markov property of solutions of (general) stochastic equations complete the book. Using careful exposition and detailed proofs, this book is a far more accessible introduction to Ito calculus than most texts. Students, practitioners and researchers will benefit from its rigorous, but unfussy, approach to technical issues. Solutions to the exercises are available online.

Driven by concrete computational problems in quantitative finance, this book provides aspiring quant developers with the numerical techniques and programming skills they need. The authors start from scratch, so the reader does not need any previous experience of C++. Beginning with straightforward option pricing on binomial trees, the book gradually progresses towards more advanced topics, including nonlinear solvers, Monte Carlo techniques for path-dependent derivative securities, finite difference methods for partial differential equations, and American option pricing by solving a linear complementarity problem. Further material, including solutions to all exercises and C++ code, is available online. The book is ideal preparation for work as an entry-level quant programmer and it gives readers the confidence to progress to more advanced skill sets involving C++ design patterns as applied in finance.

This book revolves around the concept of financial risk tolerance and its role in financial markets. Bridging different literatures and reviewing in detail the impact of European regulation on the evolution of risk tolerance assessment, this book discusses the intersection of scholarly research, practitioner experience and current and likely normative developments. In particular, the book focuses on the evolution of the debate on the suitability questionnaire - a key tool introduced with the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) and further developed with MiFID's successor - comparing it with empirical evidence on financial risk tolerance determinants, spanning from sociodemographic to behavioral components and life events. The book also looks at the future evolution of the normative framework post MiFID2 addressing in detail two key trends that are already affecting the way in which risk tolerance is dealt with in European financial markets - sustainable development and fintech and roboadvisory. The book includes an original survey run with financial market experts to assess the perceptions regarding these two trends and includes commentaries by a professional financial advisor on the key topics discussed.

Money is a promise with future benefits or dangers that are unknowable and incalculable. The financial sector is an attempt to beat uncertainty by speculating on whether prices will rise or fall. No matter how often the folly of this opportunism is shown through crisis after crisis of trust, efforts to defeat uncertainty persist. Yet uncertainty is unavoidable. Squeezed in one place, it emerges in another. Based on extensive interviews with leading actors in the financial sector, this book argues that the only way to cope with uncertainty is by relying on emotions and values. It presents an original explanation of how booms and busts arise from internal disputes over the emotions of trust between global financial corporations. Confidence and suspicion alternate between which strategy may beat competitors and who is cheating whom. Just as the first edition warned of continuing dangers in finance s betrayal of society s trust, this new edition provides a sociological explanation of how these irrational quests for certainty contributed to the current financial crisis in the credibility of money.

Students in various disciplines-from law and government to business and health policy-need to understand several quantitative aspects of finance (such as the capital asset pricing model or financial options) and policy analysis (e.g., assessing the weight of probabilistic evidence) but often have little quantitative background. This book illustrates those phenomena and explains how to illustrate them using the powerful visuals that computing can produce. Of particular interest to graduate students and scholars in need of sharper quantitative methods, this book introduces the reader to Mathematica, enables readers to use Mathematica to produce their own illustrations, and places specific emphasis on finance and policy as well as the foundations of probability theory.

The book is a contemporary compilation of important research in the area of microfinance and financial inclusion. It explores a plurality of views and experiences from different parts of the world while linking a variety of international research backgrounds. Accordingly the book will fill a gap in providing a carefully curated cross-sectorial selection of topics relevant to the development finance research community primarily but also industry practitioners who are interested in keeping abreast of developing research. Benefits in this regard also include being able to provide a platform to less established researchers offering them a voice in published form.

Essentials of Time Series for Financial Applications serves as an agile reference for upper level students and practitioners who desire a formal, easy-to-follow introduction to the most important time series methods applied in financial applications (pricing, asset management, quant strategies, and risk management). Real-life data and examples developed with EViews illustrate the links between the formal apparatus and the applications. The examples either directly exploit the tools that EViews makes available or use programs that by employing EViews implement specific topics or techniques. The book balances a formal framework with as few proofs as possible against many examples that support its central ideas. Boxes are used throughout to remind readers of technical aspects and definitions and to present examples in a compact fashion, with full details (workout files) available in an on-line appendix. The more advanced chapters provide discussion sections that refer to more advanced textbooks or detailed proofs.

This book on counting statistics presents a novel copula-based approach to counting dependent random events. It combines clustering, combinatorics-based algorithms and dependence structure in order to tackle and simplify complex problems, without disregarding the hierarchy of or interconnections between the relevant variables. These problems typically arise in real-world applications and computations involving big data in finance, insurance and banking, where experts are confronted with counting variables in monitoring random events. In this new approach, combinatorial distributions of random events are the core element. In order to deal with the high-dimensional features of the problem, the combinatorial techniques are used together with a clustering approach, where groups of variables sharing common characteristics and similarities are identified and the dependence structure within groups is taken into account. The original problems can then be modeled using new classes of copulas, referred to here as clusterized copulas, which are essentially based on preliminary groupings of variables depending on suitable characteristics and hierarchical aspects. The book includes examples and real-world data applications, with a special focus on financial applications, where the new algorithms' performance is compared to alternative approaches and further analyzed. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to master students, PhD students and researchers whose work involves or can benefit from the innovative methodologies put forward here. It will also stimulate the empirical use of new approaches among professionals and practitioners in finance, insurance and banking.

This book is the second of the two volumes featuring selected articles from the 14th Eurasia Business and Economics conference held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2014. Peer-reviewed articles in this second volume present latest research findings and breakthroughs in the areas of General Management, Human Resource Management, Marketing, SMEs, and Entrepreneurship. The contributors are both distinguished and young scholars from different parts of the World.

Japan's current shift from a manufacturing to a consumer economy is creating unprecedented opportunities for any company with the savvy to exploit this, the world's second largest market. Certainly, as the Japanese economy continues to rebound, more and more companies will continue to stake and build their presence there and use it as a springboard to enter other growing Asian markets. In Leveraging Japan, three leading authorities on market strategy and Japan present the new rules of Japanese marketing and discuss the evolution of other emerging Asian markets. These experts then share the same strategies that they've used to help American Express, Avon, Levi Strauss, and KFC, among other multinational companies, successfully establish a presence in Japan and leverage that presence to enter other Asian markets.
To read the first chapter from this book, click here.

Industry luminary Robert Pozen offers his insights on the future of U.S. finance

The recent credit crisis and the resulting bailout program are unprecedented events in the financial industry. While it's important to understand what got us here, it's even more important to consider how we should get out. While there is little question that immediate action was required to stabilize the situation, it is now time to look for a long-term plan to reform the United States financial industry.

That is where Bob Pozen comes in. Perhaps more than anyone in the industry, Pozen commands the respect and attention of the public and private sector. In this timely guide, he outlines his vision for the new financial future and provides actionable advice along the way. To Pozen, there are four high-priority problems that must be addressed, and this book puts them in perspective
Analyzes alternative models for government stakes in banksRecommends a new board structure for large financial institutionsExamines the importance of broader Fed jurisdiction over systemic risksProposes a way to revive the securitization of loans

With "Too Big to Save," you'll learn the likely future of the finance industry and understand why changes have to be made.