This volume addresses the attractiveness of financial centers with a primary focus on the mutual fund industry. It uses different empirical analysis approaches in an attempt to disentangle the reasons for location attractiveness and in order to identify its influence on fund pricing. The presented research tackles an issue that is fundamental to the understanding of organizational behavior in finance - the rationale in the decision-making process of market participants and its consequences for an economy.

This fully updated third edition is devoted to the analysis of various Stochastic Dominance (SD) decision rules. It discusses the pros and cons of each of the alternate SD rules, the application of these rules to various research areas like statistics, agriculture, medicine, measuring income inequality and the poverty level in various countries, and of course, to investment decision-making under uncertainty. The book features changes and additions to the various chapters, and also includes two completely new chapters. One deals with asymptotic SD and the relation between FSD and the maximum geometric mean (MGM) rule (or the maximum growth portfolio). The other new chapter discusses bivariate SD rules where the individual's utility is determined not only by his own wealth, but also by his standing relative to his peer group. Stochastic Dominance: Investment Decision Making under Uncertainty, 3rd Ed. covers the following basic issues: the SD approach, asymptotic SD rules, the mean-variance (MV) approach, as well as the non-expected utility approach. The non-expected utility approach focuses on Regret Theory (RT) and mainly on prospect theory (PT) and its modified version, cumulative prospect theory (CPT) which assumes S-shape preferences. In addition to these issues the book suggests a new stochastic dominance rule called the Markowitz stochastic dominance (MSD) rule corresponding to all reverse-S-shape preferences. It also discusses the concept of the multivariate expected utility and analyzed in more detail the bivariate expected utility case. From the reviews of the second edition: "This book is an economics book about stochastic dominance. ... is certainly a valuable reference for graduate students interested in decision making under uncertainty. It investigates and compares different approaches and presents many examples. Moreover, empirical studies and experimental results play an important role in this book, which makes it interesting to read." (Nicole Bauerle, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2007 d)

The book provides an integrated approach to risk sharing, risk spreading and efficient regulation through principal agent models. It emphasizes the role of information asymmetry and risk sharing in contracts as an alternative to transaction cost considerations. It examines how contracting, as an institutional mechanism to conduct transactions, spreads risks while attempting consolidation. It further highlights the shifting emphasis in contracts from Coasian transaction cost saving to risk sharing and shows how it creates difficulties associated with risk spreading, and emphasizes the need for efficient regulation of contracts at various levels. Each of the chapters is structured using a principal agent model, and all chapters incorporate adverse selection (and exogenous randomness) as a result of information asymmetry, as well as moral hazard (and endogenous randomness) due to the self-interest-seeking behavior on the part of the participants.

This book collects important contributions in behavioral economics and related topics, mainly by Japanese researchers, to provide new perspectives for the future development of economics and behavioral economics. The volume focuses especially on economic studies that examine interactions of multiple agents and/or market phenomena by using behavioral economics models. Reflecting the diverse fields of the editors, the book captures broad influences of behavioral economics on various topics in economics. Those subjects include parental altruism, economic growth and development, the relative and permanent income hypotheses, wealth distribution, asset price bubbles, auctions, search, contracts, personnel management and market efficiency and anomalies in financial markets. The chapter authors have added newly written addenda to the original articles in which they address their own subsequent works, supplementary analyses, detailed information on the underlying data and/or recent literature surveys. This will help readers to further understand recent developments in behavioral economics and related research.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Management Science and Engineering: Innovation and High-tech Services, ICMSE 2013, held in Macau, in June 2013. The papers are contributed by innovative researchers, engineers and practitioners in the field of management science, information system, finance, economics and accounting and offer a platform for exchanging the latest research findings in the field of management science and management innovation, for looking forward to the future trends in the management science and management innovation field in the 21st century, and to promote management modernization and high-tech innovation services.

​ The goal of this book is to assess the efficacy of India’s financial deregulation programme by analyzing the developments in cost efficiency and total factor productivity growth across different ownership types and size classes in the banking sector over the post-deregulation years. The work also gauges the impact of inclusion or exclusion of a proxy for non-traditional activities on the cost efficiency estimates for Indian banks, and ranking of distinct ownership groups. It also investigates the hitherto neglected aspect of the nature of returns-to-scale in the Indian banking industry. In addition, the work explores the key bank-specific factors that explain the inter-bank variations in efficiency and productivity growth. Overall, the empirical results of this work allow us to ascertain whether the gradualist approach to reforming the banking system in a developing economy like India has yielded the most significant policy goal of achieving efficiency and productivity gains. The authors believe that the findings of this book could give useful policy directions and suggestions to other developing economies that have embarked on a deregulation path or are contemplating doing so.

The New-Keynesian Approach to Understanding the Economy.- Michael Woodford's Contributions to Monetary Economics.- The New-Keynesian Approach to Monetary Policy Analysis: Lessons and New Directions.- The New-Keynesian Approach in Forecasting and Monetary Policy Design.- The Case for Forecast Targeting as a Monetary Policy Strategy.- Incorporating Conjunctural Analysis in Structural Models.- Money in Monetary Policy Design: Monetary Cross-Checking in the New-Keynesian Model.- Will Monetary Policy Become More of a Science?.- Will Monetary Policy Become More of a Science?.- The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics 2007: Award Ceremony and Scientific Symposium in Honor of Michael Woodford.- The Award of the Deutsche Bank Prize 2007.- Opening Speeches at the Scientific Symposium.- Hermann-Josef Lamberti (Deutsche Bank AG).- Summary of the Scientific Symposium "The Theory and Practice of Monetary Policy Today".- The Theory and Practice of Monetary Policy Today - Successes, Failures and Open Questions.- The Theory and Practice of Monetary Policy Today - Successes, Failures and Open Questions.

This book contains a unique collection of studies on key economic and social policy challenges faced by countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean region in a short- and long-term perspective. Prepared within the EU funded FP7 project on „Prospective Analysis for the Mediterranean Region (MEDPRO)” conducted in 2010-2013 it takes account on recent political developments in the region (Arab Spring) and their potential consequences. It covers a broad spectrum of topics such as factors of economic growth, macroeconomic and fiscal stability, trade and investment, Euro-Mediterranean and intra-regional economic integration, private sector development and privatizations, infrastructure, tourism, agriculture, financial sector development, poverty and inequality, education, labor market and gender issues.

This book analyzes the political economy of higher education finance across a range of OECD countries, exploring why some students pay extortionate tuition fees whilst for others their education is free. What are the redistributional consequences of these different tuition-subsidy systems? Analysing the variety of existing systems, Garritzmann shows that across the advanced democracies "Four Worlds of Student Finance" exist. Historically, however, all countries' higher education systems looked very much alike in the 1940s. The book develops a theoretical model, the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory, to explain why countries have evolved from a similar historical starting point to today's very distinct Four Worlds. The empirical analyses combine a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative evidence, studying higher education policies in all advanced democracies from 1945-2015.

Although 'doing good' is our innate nature, we often get lost in the complexities and view goodness as a distant dream. Making this dream of goodness a reality is often thwarted by thoughts surrounding sustainability. Thus, all good initiatives require a focus on sustainability and this has become one of greatest and most formidable challenges faced by any social enterprise. The book documents the understanding of the sustainability of one of the most celebrated forms of social enterprise of our times - Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) gained through a mixed-methods research investigation. It attempts to answer pertinent questions such as: What are the determinant and discriminating factors for the sustainability of MFIs in India? How are these factors being managed by the operationally efficient Indian MFIs that remained sustainable at reasonable interest rates before the onset of the crisis and ceilings imposition in Indian microfinance markets? What does the Indian microfinance crisis teach us about sustainability management and mismanagement? In a nutshell, the answers show that sustainability is a strategic issue that needs managerial attention and not a matter to be left to serendipity. At a time when the industry is recovering from the adverse effects of a crisis and when there are still contentions as to whether the rate fixed by the regulator is enough for the sustenance of the MFIs, the findings mentioned in the book revive the lost hope for the Indian microfinance industry. By deciphering the strategies used by efficient and sustainable MFIs and discussing the lessons that the crisis has imparted to the Indian microfinance markets, this book will enable Indian MFIs to march towards efficient and sustainable operations without losing focus on their clients.

This textbook first introduces the reader to return measurement and then goes on to compare the time-weighted rate of return (TWR) with the money-weighted rate of return (MWR). To emphasize the importance of risk in conjunction with return, different tracking errors are analyzed and ex-post versus ex-ante risk figures are compared. The author then proceeds to modern portfolio theory (MPT) and illustrates how the constraints interfere substantially in the construction of optimized portfolios. As a conclusion, the book provides the reader with all the essential aspects of investment controlling.

This insightful management book introduces an inspirational new ethics-oriented approach to business and leadership for current and future leaders. It argues that the challenges of today's global era require a new, more holistic and ethical leadership approach than conventional concepts suggest. A framework for the concept of "inclusive leadership" is developed by linking leadership challenges and tasks to the transforming world. Based on over thirty years professional experience in various sectors of society and in both executive and advisory roles in business, the author offers practical suggestions on how to apply inclusive leadership in day-to-day activities. The book also emphasizes how ethics and virtues should influence and shape leadership, a link that is often absent in conventional leadership literature. Building a bridge between theory and practice, this book offers both practical and academic perspectives, with the ideas and concepts illustrated with many real-life examples.

The main purpose of this book is to resolve deficiencies and limitations that currently exist when using Technical Analysis (TA). Particularly, TA is being used either by academics as an "economic test" of the weak-form Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) or by practitioners as a main or supplementary tool for deriving trading signals. This book approaches TA in a systematic way utilizing all the available estimation theory and tests. This is achieved through the developing of novel rule-based pattern recognizers, and the implementation of statistical tests for assessing the importance of realized returns. More emphasis is given to technical patterns where subjectivity in their identification process is apparent. Our proposed methodology is based on the algorithmic and thus unbiased pattern recognition. The unified methodological framework presented in this book can serve as a benchmark for both future academic studies that test the null hypothesis of the weak-form EMH and for practitioners that want to embed TA within their trading/investment decision making processes.

Crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly popular method to finance projects of every kind and scale. This contributed volume is one of the earliest books presenting scientific and research-based perspectives of crowdfunding, its development, and future. The European Crowdfunding Network (ECN) and its scientific work group, together with FGF e.V., invited both researchers and practitioners to contribute to this first state-of-the-art edited volume on crowdfunding in Europe. This book contributes to a better comprehension of crowdfunding, encourages further fundamental research and contributes to a systematization of this new field of research. The book also features expert contributions by practitioners to enhance and complement the scientific perspective. This book can be used as a guideline and shall advance classification in an emerging research field.

Finance and energy markets have been an active scientific field for some time, even though the development and applications of sophisticated quantitative methods in these areas are relatively new-and referred to in a broader context as energy finance. Energy finance is often viewed as a branch of mathematical finance, yet this area continues to provide a rich source of issues that are fuelling new and exciting research developments. Based on a special thematic year at the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI) in Vienna, Austria, this edited collection features cutting-edge research from leading scientists in the fields of energy and commodity finance. Topics discussed include modeling and analysis of energy and commodity markets, derivatives hedging and pricing, and optimal investment strategies and modeling of emerging markets, such as power and emissions. The book also confronts the challenges one faces in energy markets from a quantitative point of view, as well as the recent advances in solving these problems using advanced mathematical, statistical and numerical methods. By addressing the emerging area of quantitative energy finance, this volume will serve as a valuable resource for graduate-level students and researchers studying financial mathematics, risk management, or energy finance.

In the last decade, energy markets have developed substantially due to the growing activity of financial investors. One consequence of this massive presence of investors is a stronger link between the hitherto segmented energy and financial markets. This book addresses some of the recent developments in the interrelationship between financial and energy markets. It aims to further the understanding of the rich interplay between financial and energy markets by presenting several empirical studies that illustrate and discuss some of the main issues on this agenda.

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.

This book will guide financial institutions in developing new approaches and solutions for handling perennial issues. Emphasizing the value of creativity for project management in the banking sector, the author provides new insights for all those working in banking and finance. Presenting a number of new, outside-the-box ideas, the book can be regarded as the missing spice that will creatively transform all other ingredients in the monetary world.

Any financial asset that is openly traded has a market price. Except for extreme market conditions, market price may be more or less than a "fair" value. Fair value is likely to be some complicated function of the current intrinsic value of tangible or intangible assets underlying the claim and our assessment of the characteristics of the underlying assets with respect to the expected rate of growth, future dividends, volatility, and other relevant market factors. Some of these factors that affect the price can be measured at the time of a transaction with reasonably high accuracy. Most factors, however, relate to expectations about the future and to subjective issues, such as current management, corporate policies and market environment, that could affect the future financial performance of the underlying assets. Models are thus needed to describe the stochastic factors and environment, and their implementations inevitably require computational finance tools.

This book is the first 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 first volume present latest research breakthroughs in the areas of Accounting, Corporate Governance, Finance and Banking, Institutional and International Economics, and Regional Studies. The contributors are both distinguished and young scholars from different parts of the World.

Since the groundbreaking research of Harry Markowitz into the application of operations research to the optimization of investment portfolios, finance has been one of the most important areas of application of operations research. The use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) has become one of the hottest areas of research for such applications to finance. This handbook offers systemic applications of different methodologies that have been used for decision making solutions to the financial problems of global markets. As the follow-up to the authors' Hidden Markov Models in Finance (2007), this offers the latest research developments and applications of HMMs to finance and other related fields. Amongst the fields of quantitative finance and actuarial science that will be covered are: interest rate theory, fixed-income instruments, currency market, annuity and insurance policies with option-embedded features, investment strategies, commodity markets, energy, high-frequency trading, credit risk, numerical algorithms, financial econometrics and operational risk. Hidden Markov Models in Finance: Further Developments and Applications, Volume II presents recent applications and case studies in finance and showcases the formulation of emerging potential applications of new research over the book's 11 chapters. This will benefit not only researchers in financial modeling, but also others in fields such as engineering, the physical sciences and social sciences. Ultimately the handbook should prove to be a valuable resource to dynamic researchers interested in taking full advantage of the power and versatility of HMMs in accurately and efficiently capturing many of the processes in the financial market.

Applied Corporate Finance fills a gap in the existing resources available to students and professionals needing an academically rigorous, yet practically orientated, source of knowledge about corporate finance. Written by an expert in investment analysis, this textbook leads readers to truly understand the principles behind corporate finance in a real world context from both a firm and investor perspective. The focus of this text is on traditional theory applied to a holistic business case study, offering readers both a quantitative and qualitative perspective on such topics as capital budgeting, time value of money, corporate risk, and capital structure. Each section in the book corresponds to the order in which a business makes key financial decisions-as opposed to level of difficulty-allowing readers to grasp a comprehensive understanding of the corporate financial life cycle. Directly addressing the area of corporate finance in an applied setting, and featuring numerous case examples and end-of-chapter discussion questions and problems, this textbook will appeal to advanced undergraduates majoring in finance, graduate-level students, as well as professionals in need of a quick refresher on corporate financial policy.

Three dominant forces worldwide are driving change today in our financial markets: competition, technology and regulation. But their collective impact in reshaping the markets, though they may be viewed individually as desirable or well-intentioned, is producing challenging results that are difficult to predict, hard to control and not easy to understand. Extreme market turbulence has underlined the key issues as much attention turns to the appropriate regulatory response. That is the backdrop for this thought-provoking book, emerging from a Baruch College Conference on equity market structure in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and featuring contributions from an acclaimed panel of international scholars, policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders. The result presents emerging perspective and ideas that illuminate the dynamics of financial regulation today and into the future. The Zicklin School of Business Financial Markets Series presents the insights emerging from a sequence of conferences hosted by the Zicklin School at Baruch College for industry professionals, regulators, and scholars. Much more than historical documents, the transcripts from the conferences are edited for clarity, perspective and context; material and comments from subsequent interviews with the panelists and speakers are integrated for a complete thematic presentation. Each book is focused on a well delineated topic, but all deliver broader insights into the quality and efficiency of the U.S. equity markets and the dynamic forces changing them.

This book provides a unique comparative and global analysis of the regulation of disclosure in financial (securities) markets. It is written by two authors who represent both the new world (Australia) and the old world (Germany). The authors present their research in the global business context, with legal and regulatory perspectives including some references from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. After every "boom" and "bust", legislators pass new disclosure legislation, often in a heated environment fuelled by politics and the media. Little regard is paid to existing regulation or the lessons learned from earlier regulation. The result is the continuing enactment of redundant and overlapping disclosure laws. Since financial markets are often described as markets for information, the failure to ensure disclosure is at the heart of financial services regulation. This book argues that the solution to the failure of disclosure is a brief, easily understood, principles-based, plain English safety-net amendment to statute law such as "you must keep the financial market fully informed", a measure that would support effective mandatory continuous disclosure of information to financial markets. This book examines the reasons for disclosure regulation, and how the efficient operation of financial markets is dependent on disclosure. It examines the adequacy of common law and civil law concerning broker/client disclosure, and concludes that industry licensing in itself fails to keep the market informed. While recognizing the failures of securities commissions to achieve good disclosure in financial markets, it confirms the effectiveness of coregulation of disclosure by a commission with the support of the financial markets (such as the stock exchange). Coregulation builds on financial market self-regulation, and is best described in the words of one-time SEC Chairman William O. Douglas, who, in the 1930s, described it as a shotgun behind the door.

In the era of Big Data our society is given the unique opportunity to understand the inner dynamics and behavior of complex socio-economic systems. Advances in the availability of very large databases, in capabilities for massive data mining, as well as progress in complex systems theory, multi-agent simulation and computational social science open the possibility of modeling phenomena never before successfully achieved. This contributed volume from the Perm Winter School address the problems of the mechanisms and statistics of the socio-economics system evolution with a focus on financial markets powered by the high-frequency data analysis.