This book investigates how a North African solar thermal power plant can be set up under the guidance of European investors (e.g. the Desertec Concept) as a Public Private Partnership (PPP). It outlines the importance of early awareness of contract-related risks, investment risks and dispute settlement, arguing that commercial and investment arbitration are the best tools for settling disputes regarding a large-scale solar thermal project. Furthermore, by comparing institutional and ad hoc arbitration, it shows that the former offers highly suitable support. The latest developments in the area of investment arbitration under EU law and the general acceptance of arbitration in Islamic countries are examined in particular. This book also demonstrates that a solar thermal power plant must meet certain requirements to be considered an investment. These requirements are examined in relation to Art. 25 of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes Convention (ICSID Convention) and respective case law. Overall, the book offers valuable guidelines for investors and host states on how to successfully implement large-scale solar thermal projects.

This book discusses the risks and opportunities that arise in Emerging Asia given the context of a new environment in global liquidity and capital flows. It elaborates on the need to ensure financial and overall economic stability in the region through improved financial regulation and other policy measures to minimize the emergent risks. "Managing Elevated Risk: Global Liquidity, Capital Flows, and Macroprudential Policy—An Asian Perspective" also explores the range of policy options that may be deployed to address the impact of global liquidity on domestic financial and socio-economic conditions including income inequality. The book is primarily aimed at policy makers, financial market regulators and supervisory agencies to help them improve national regulatory systems and to promote harmonization of national regulations and practices in line with global standards. Scholars and researchers will also gain important information and knowledge about the overall impacts of changing global liquidity from the book.

This volume investigates the impact of energy technology innovations on economic development and presents new areas of research into the financial economics of energy as well as new studies into valuation, electricity pricing and the economic, regulatory and environmental costs of alternative energy sources. Academics and practitioners take a global perspective and present cases from several countries. The book concentrates on three issues: 1) innovation and shocks in energy markets; 2) environment and renewables and 3) fossil fuel regulation. The book will provide a useful resource for anyone with an academic or business interest in energy and value issues. This is the fourth volume in a series on energy organized by the Center for Energy and Value Issues (CEVI). The previous volumes in the series include Financial Aspects in Energy (2011), Energy Economics and Financial Markets (2012) and Perspectives on Energy Risk (2014).

The book analyses the establishment of De Nederlandsche Bank and its early development as a case study to test competing theories on the historical development of central banking. It is shown that the establishment of DNB can be explained by both the fiscal theory and the financial stability theory. Later development makes clear that the financial stability role of DNB prevailed. DNB´s bank notes were not forced onto the public and competition was fierce. A prudent and independent stance was necessary to be able to play its intended role. This meant that DNB played a modest role in the Amsterdam money market until 1852. By 1852 it had established itself to become the central bank. By then its bank notes had become generally accepted and it could start to operate as a reserve bank. Also the market context had changed dramatically, its competitors had been driven out of the market and several credit institutions had become customers of DNB. "On the occasion of the Nederlandsche Bank's 200th Anniversary, it is good to have a new, and an extremely good, history of its founding and first fifty years of operation. The only previous account of this period of the DNB's history was legalistic and did not sufficiently place the Bank´s development in its wider context. Uittenbogaard's book provides a much broader, and better, story of the personnel, economics, and finance of the DNB at this juncture." - Charles Goodhart, LSE.

Financial authorities face a number of key challenges, including maintaining financial stability; ensuring long-term finance for stable economic growth; promoting greater access to financial services for both households and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); and fostering a competitive financial industry. Access to finance for SMEs is particularly important, given their large shares in economic activity and employment in Asian economies. Striking the appropriate balance in achieving these objectives through financial supervision and regulation is an important policy issue for financial regulators. This book is the record of a joint conference in 2014 organized by the Asian Development Bank Institute; Financial Services Agency, Japan; and International Monetary Fund Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific on the topic of financial system stability, regulation, and financial inclusion. Participants included noted scholars, policymakers, and financial industrial participants from Asia.   ADB Institute The ADB Institute, located in Tokyo, is the think tank of the Asian Development Bank. Its mission is to identify effective development strategies and improve development management in ADB’s developing member countries.   Financial Services Agency, Japan The Financial Services Agency, Japan is responsible for ensuring the stability of Japan’s financial system, the protection of depositors, insurance policyholders and securities investors, and smooth finance through such measures as planning and policymaking.   International Monetary Fund Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific The International Monetary Fund Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific contributes to economic surveillance and research, leads the IMF’s involvement in regional cooperation, manages regional capacity building programs, and promotes the understanding and two-way dialogue of the IMF in the region.

This book deals with the application of wavelet and spectral methods for the analysis of nonlinear and dynamic processes in economics and finance. It reflects some of the latest developments in the area of wavelet methods applied to economics and finance. The topics include business cycle analysis, asset prices, financial econometrics, and forecasting. An introductory paper by James Ramsey, providing a personal retrospective of a decade's research on wavelet analysis, offers an excellent overview over the field.

Since 1998, the world's leading experts on accounting and regulation have convened in a series of workshops to explore and analyze emerging issues in the field. They have covered a wide array of topics, including corporate governance, auditing, financial disclosure, international standards boards, and the dynamics of markets and institutions. Most recently, they have focused on the role that accounting practices and policies may have played in the global financial crisis of 2008. In this volume, the editors showcase contributions from the workshops that represent the full spectrum of issues and perspectives relating to accounting and regulation. Each paper incorporates the most current examples and references to reflect the latest insights, with an emphasis on exploring future implications for theory and research, practice, and policymaking.

This book addresses the issue of intangibles' contribution to growth at macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. It provides a review of a set of new approaches to innovation growth. It also considers the issue of how to invest in intangibles, especially with regard to the market failure issue. The book focusses on three major themes: First it provides a better understanding of how intangibles contribute to economic growth and value creation. In a second part it presents emerging practices as well as examples of market failure, analyzing managerial practices in relationship to market imperfections. Finally the book links the value of intangibles with innovation and the performance of firms.

This monograph provides a comprehensive source of analysis and research on alternative investments in the wealth management process, with a special focus on Poland and Eastern Europe. It presents the characteristics that distinguish alternative investments from traditional investments and illustrates the benefits and risks involved in the former. The experience gained in developed countries is extremely valuable for the analysis of both the Polish and Eastern European financial markets. In the theoretical part of the book, key aspects of alternative investments are collected, systematized and developed; subsequently, in the empirical part the results of selected studies on the alternative investment sector around the world are examined. Lastly, the book’s findings are applied to the context of alternative financial investments in Poland, investigating the preferences for alternative investments in the country, which is the largest market in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only of theoretical interest, these insights have a high application value, making the book an essential resource for scholars, practitioners and policymakers alike.

This book reflects the state of the art on nonlinear economic dynamics, financial market modelling and quantitative finance. It contains eighteen papers with topics ranging from disequilibrium macroeconomics, monetary dynamics, monopoly, financial market and limit order market models with boundedly rational heterogeneous agents to estimation, time series modelling and empirical analysis and from risk management of interest-rate products, futures price volatility and American option pricing with stochastic volatility to evaluation of risk and derivatives of electricity market. The book illustrates some of the most recent research tools in these areas and will be of interest to economists working in economic dynamics and financial market modelling, to mathematicians who are interested in applying complexity theory to economics and finance and to market practitioners and researchers in quantitative finance interested in limit order, futures and electricity market modelling, derivative pricing and risk management.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have faced serious financial problems and have been looking to financial institutions and governments for solutions and new proposals to address these issues. This book examines the new challenge in which firms receive sustainable funding that is in alignment with the company’s spending capacity. The purpose of this book is to examine the main theoretical issues and practices regarding entrepreneurship and finance and their impact on performance, innovation and economic growth. It analyzes the fundamental aspects of entrepreneurship and studies ways in which financial institutions can better fulfill their primary function of feeding capital to businesses and the economy as a whole. Entrepreneurship and finance are fundamental to achieving success in economic and social activities. SMEs’ existence and development depend on the initiatives of entrepreneurship and access to resources, especially those of a financial nature. During the recent economic crisis, several new financing instruments have appeared, especially with structures designed for helping SMEs make their way out of the recession. This book explores some of these tools in various global economies, such as France and Spain, providing an international, multidimensional perspective.

The changing dynamics of business worldwide have led organizations to look beyond traditional managerial practices while at the same time attempting to retain their core competitive advantages. This development has called upon academicians and practitioners alike to reassess the different aspects of business management such as macroeconomic variables, the nature of the market, the changing features of the workplace, the new work ethos, and/or employer-employee exchanges. In this context, the book provides essential insights on industry innovations, academic advances and policy movements with regard to recovering markets in India and around the globe. The individual papers highlight potential avenues that could allow industry to better understand and respond to the global crisis. The book collects research papers presented at the Global Conference on Managing in Recovering Markets (GCMRM), held in March 2014. Seven international and 120 national business schools and management universities were represented at the conference, the first in a series of 13 planned under the GCMRM agenda for 2014–17. The book includes more than 30 research papers chosen from a pool of 118 presented at the conference, all of which have undergone a rigorous blind review process.

Examining the implications of recent important developments, the primary aim of this book is to bridge the gaps in existing literature on India-Pakistan economic engagement and to examine various aspects of the trade normalization process. The book includes familiar themes of India-Pakistan bilateral trade in goods and services, providing new insights into the potential for trade and the challenges involved in realizing it. The respective chapters examine the current trade trends and identify the possible sectors for bilateral FDI flows between the two countries, which could help forge deeper economic ties between them. In light of India’s changed investment policy, this analysis is pertinent for investors and policy-makers alike. The book also includes chapters on a variety of unconventional subjects, such as estimating the levels of informal trade, an analysis of a trade perception survey and identifying trade potential using a CGE modeling approach. Further, a number of sectors have been identified for in-depth analysis, including sports goods, healthcare and energy. These sector-based analyses reflect the gap between current levels of trade in the selected industries and the possible trade potential. The studies identify key tradable commodities in the health and sports industries, as well as opportunities for trading in energy. The book thus provides readers with a deep understanding of the process of normalizing economic relations and enhancing bilateral trade at the micro and macro levels, on the basis of which the authors subsequently provide recommendations for policymakers.

The current world financial scene indicates at an intertwined and interdependent relationship between financial market activity and economic health. This book explains how the economic messages delivered by the dynamic evolution of financial asset returns are strongly related to option prices. The Black Scholes framework is introduced and by underlining its shortcomings, an alternative approach is presented that has emerged over the past ten years of academic research, an approach that is much more grounded on a realistic statistical analysis of data rather than on ad hoc tractable continuous time option pricing models. The reader then learns what it takes to understand and implement these option pricing models based on time series analysis in a self-contained way. The discussion covers modeling choices available to the quantitative analyst, as well as the tools to decide upon a particular model based on the historical datasets of financial returns. The reader is then guided into numerical deduction of option prices from these models and illustrations with real examples are used to reflect the accuracy of the approach using datasets of options on equity indices.

This book is a major work that focuses exclusively on ship finance and includes contributions on the increasingly complex field of ship finance, which has over the last two decades become a key aspect in the world of shipping and ship owning. The book offers an enlightening mix of theoretical analysis and well-founded practical insights into the daily markets. Given that ship finance continues to develop dynamically around the world, the book covers subjects ranging from the German KG market to Islamic Finance, from loans to legal aspects and from asset pricing to risk management.

This textbook is an elementary introduction to the key topics in mathematical finance and financial economics - two realms of ideas that substantially overlap but are often treated separately from each other. Our goal is to present the highlights in the field, with the emphasis on the financial and economic content of the models, concepts and results. The book provides a novel, unified treatment of the subject by deriving each topic from common fundamental principles and showing the interrelations between the key themes. Although the presentation is fully rigorous, with some rare and clearly marked exceptions, the book restricts itself to the use of only elementary mathematical concepts and techniques. No advanced mathematics (such as stochastic calculus) is used.

The book's 30 chapters are divided into three sections - international trade, economic development, macroeconomics and finance - and focus on the frontier issues in each. Section I addresses analytical issues relating to trade-environment linkage, capital accumulation for pollution abatement, possibility of technology diffusion by multinational corporations, nature of innovation inducing tariff protection, effects of import restriction and child labour, the links between exchange rate, direction of trade and financial crisis-the implications for India and global economic crisis, financial institutions and global capital flows and balance of payments imbalances. Section II consists of discussions on the causes of widespread poverty persisting in South Asia, development dividend associated with peace in South Asia, issues of well-being and human development, implications for endogenous growth through human capital accumulation on environmental quality and taxation, the rationale for a labour supply schedule for the poor, switching as an investment strategy, the role of government and strategic interaction in the presence of information asymmetry, government's role in controlling food inflation, inter-state variations in levels and growth of industry in India, structural breaks in India's service sector development, and the phenomenon of wasted votes in India's parliamentary elections. Section III deals with the effectiveness of monetary policy in tackling economic crisis, the effective demand model of corporate leverages and recession, the empirical link between stock market development and economic growth in cross-country experience in Asia, an empirical verification of the Mckinnon-Shaw hypothesis for financial development in India, the dynamics of the behaviour of the Indian stock market, efficiency of non-life insurance companies, econometric study of the causal linkage between FDI and current account balance in India and the implications of contagious crises for the Indian economy.

This book discusses market microstructure environment within the context of the global financial crisis. In the first part, the market microstructure theory is recalled and the main microstructure models and hypotheses are discussed. The second part focuses on the main effects of the financial downturn through an examination of market microstructure dynamics. In particular, the effects of market imperfections and the limitations associated with microstructure models are discussed. Finally, the new regulations and recent developments for financial markets that aim to improve the market microstructure are discussed. Well-known experts on the subject contribute to the chapters in the book. A must-read for academic researchers, students and quantitative practitioners.

This book examines sustainable wealth formation and dynamic decision-making. The global economy experienced a veritable meltdown of asset markets in the years 2007-9, where many funds were overexposed to risky returns and suffered considerable losses. On the other hand, the long-term upswing in the stock market since 2010 has led to asset price booms and some new, but also uneven, wealth formation. In this book a broader set of constraints and guidelines for asset management and wealth accumulation is developed. The authors investigate how wealth formation and the proper management of financial funds can help to adequately buffer income risk and obtain sufficient risk-free income at a later stage of life, while also being socially and environmentally sustainable. The book explores behavioral and institutional rules for decision-making that reflect such constraints and guidelines, without necessarily being optimal in the narrow sense. The authors explain the need for such a dynamic decision-making and dynamic re-balancing of portfolios, by putting forward dynamic programming as an approach to dynamic decision-making that can allow sustainable wealth accumulation and dynamic asset allocation to be successfully integrated. This book provides a clear and comprehensive treatment of asset accumulation and dynamic portfolio models with an emphasis on long term and sustainable wealth formation. An important concern in public debate is the sustainability of our economy and this book employs cutting edge quantitative techniques and models to highlight important facts that cannot be disputed under any reasonable assumptions. It has the potential to become a standard reference for both academic researchers and quantitatively trained practitioners. Eckhard Platen, Professor of Quantitative Finance, University of Technology Sydney, Australia This book should be read by both academics and practitioners alike. The former will find intellectually rigorous discussions and innovative solutions. The latter may find a few of the concepts a bit challenging. Yet, theory and technology are there to help simplify the work of those who worry about what time it is rather than how to make a watch--- but they do need a watch. Jean Brunel, Founder of Brunel Associates and Editor of The Journal of Wealth Management

This book addresses synergy management, which poses an important challenge for firms, advisors and practitioners involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Synergy plays a key role in M&A contexts, both in the decision-making process and, subsequently, in the integration phase. However, despite the fact that synergy value is commonly regarded as one of the key success factors in M&A, research shows that firms generally fail to achieve the expected synergy. The extant literature is characterized by a lack of comprehensive models of synergy management: the assessment of synergy value remains a "black box" for scholars and practitioners alike. The authors provide a comprehensive framework for synergy management by integrating findings from prior research and various disciplines. The framework highlights the main dimensions of synergy management in mergers and acquisitions, common pitfalls, and new models and tools for avoiding them. As such, the book enriches the M&A literature, offers new insights for scholars, and provides valuable guidelines for practitioners involved in synergy management.

This book is for anyone who wants to know what truly lies behind the scandals and disasters of global business which marred the first few years of the 21st century. It examines why companies fail, finding the reasons few, yet all too common. It also explores what the prudent investor, board member or manager should be alert to but often is not.

This peer-reviewed volume from the Society for the Study of Business and Finance, discusses current issues in globalization and financial system from an international political and economic perspective. Contemporary instruments and actors in the global financial system are specially analyzed and the discussion of managerial and financial issues of the global financial strategies offers novelty to readers and researchers in the field.

Against the backdrop of China’s increasingly influential role in the international financial architecture, this book seeks to characterize and evaluate China’s financial power potential. It does so by analyzing the relationship between domestic financial repression and international financial power in the context of the political economy of the developmental state. On the basis of a novel theoretical framework for the analysis of the financial power potential of developmental states, the book provides an in-depth analysis of China’s approach to currency internationalization, its creditor status and its policies towards the Bretton Woods institutions while contrasting the country’s present role in global finance with the position of the Japanese developmental state in the 1980s and 1990s.

This book focuses on the achievements, current trends and further potential of microfinance to scale-up and serve many more clients with financial services that enable them to improve their living conditions. The book asks what it takes to achieve sustainable impact: to know your clients and to understand their needs, to treat them in a fair and transparent way, and to safeguard the synthesis between the financial and social dimension of sustainable microfinance. The book also sheds light on the future funding landscape and what is necessary to bring more commercial funders on board while ensuring that these new funders will continue the commitment to responsible finance. While being forward looking, the book reflects the debate on core values of microfinance, triggered by recent criticisms of an approach that was hailed as a panacea in the beginning and which had proved over time as one of the most effective models of development finance. These criticisms emerged over signs of overheating in some markets, particularly the 2010 events in Andhra Pradesh, and turned into an assumption of a worldwide microfinance crisis, putting seriously at stake the good reputation microfinance had enjoyed so far.

 Bank foundations serve an important purpose in the Italian nonprofit sector. This book presents the legal grounds, areas of intervention, and basic tools involved in the asset management and grant-making activities that such organizations undertake. A special emphasis focuses on the analyses of the organizational structure of bank foundations and the relevant aspects of governance, particularly with regard to the composition, roles, and responsibilities of bank foundation boards. The general reduction in the resources to which they have access requires a new strategy that clearly defines long-term goals and the necessary procedures to achieve them. The topic of strategic planning is therefore also central to this text, which examines its peculiarities, content and governing bodies. The analysis of some case studies provides a better understanding of the manner in which foundations interpret strategic planning and reveals strengths and weaknesses that demand careful attention.