This book stresses the psychological perspective in explaining financial behavior. Traditionally, financial behaviors such as saving, spending, and investing have been explained using demographic and economic factors such as income and product pricing. The consequence of this way of thinking is that financial institutions view their clients mostly from the perspective of their income. By taking a psychological approach, this book stresses the perspective of consumers confronted with a quickly changing financial world: the changing of financial offers and products (savings, investments, loans), the changing of payment methods (from cash to cheques, cards and mobile payments), the accessibility and temptation of goods, and the changing of insurance and pension systems. The Psychology of Financial Consumer Behavior provides insight into the thought processes of consumers in a variety of financial topics. Coverage includes perceptions of wealth, the pleasure or pain of spending, cashless transactions, saving and investing, loans, planning for the future, taxes, and financial education. The book holds appeal for researchers, professionals, and students in economics, psychology, economic psychology, marketing and consumer science, or anyone interested in financial behaviors.

Risk Quantification and Allocation Methods for Practitioners offers a practical approach to risk management in the financial industry. This in-depth study provides quantitative tools to better describe qualitative issues, as well as clear explanations of how to transform recent theoretical developments into computational practice, and key tools for dealing with the issues of risk measurement and capital allocation.

Informal finance consists of nonbank financing activities, whether conducted through family and friends, local money houses, or other types of financial associations. It has provided much-needed financing to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular, in the face of a tightly constrained and overburdened formal banking system. Unable to obtain a bank loan, firms have relied upon individuals and informal organizations outside of the banking system to obtain financing for their ventures or working capital (operating funds). Presently there is a scarcity of information on informal finance in China and it is expected to have a significant impact upon GDP and money supply.
This book, with contributions from leading scholars, describes the evolution, characteristics, and variation of informal finance in China from American and Chinese perspectives. Literature by Jiang Shuxia, Jiang Xuzhao, and Li Jianjun has heretofore been available only in Chinese, while work by Kellee Tsai, Jianwen Liao, Harold Welsch, David Pistrui, and Sara Hsu has been available in English. For the first time, they come together to discuss informal financing and its many aspects.
Most of the essays are based upon original survey research conducted locally, as this type of data is not normally collected by the government. The papers pioneer the description and analysis of the nuances of informal finance from several perspectives; the authors look at the social, cultural, political, and economic causes of informal finance, its many variations, and its economic, personal, and political ramifications.

The first major global economic contraction of the 21st century, or the 'Great Recession', as it is more commonly known, began in December of 2007, and would prove to be one of the most catastrophic economic events in postmodern history. The bursting of the American housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis that followed are widely attributed as being the primary causes for this economic downturn.The content of this book presents an in-depth analysis of several of the leading causes of the subprime crisis, as well as the subsequent measures that were used to contain a widespread economic recession. It is the aim of this book to provide adequate information and tools for readers to gain insight on how we can prevent the same mistakes from happening again. This analysis also explores an interesting question when considering public policy; was the economic disaster, that ensued, caused by overzealous consumers who borrowed more than they could afford, or was it caused by institutional entities that gambled away the American economy?

The goal of Angel Financing is to get deals funded by providing useful, research-grounded, relevant, practical information to investors, entrepreneurs, and intermediaries.

This area of investment is the "pre-IPO," characterized by private placement transactions primarily equity in nature. Entrepreneurs must understand the problem, face the challenge, and possess the skills necessary to address the problem. Because their resources, time, and training are limited, entrepreneurs must understand the private placement, a unique process that demands a capitalization strategy.

Most importantly, entrepreneurs must embrace the investor perspective. In this one-of-a-kind book, Angel Financing provides a strategy that works. Hundreds of people have used the principles detailed in this book to raise millions of dollars.

The value of the angel investor, after all, can no longer be denied: Angel capital is the primary source of capital for early-stage deals. This fact alone accounts for the plethora of matching networks, seminars, and venture forums on the subject. Although the huge contribution of the angel capital market in creating jobs, expanding the tax base, and increasing our global competitiveness through technological innovation is well known, little is understood about the angel equity market and how deals really get done.

Moreover, over the last ten years, the authors have built the largest angel database in North America and interviewed thousands of investors about the nature of the pre-IPO investment process. Through their proprietary research and their comprehensive development of a typology of investors, the reader will not only be better positioned to identify and qualify investors, but will also be better sensitized to prepare the documents and the sales strategy to close their deals.

In Angel Financing, the angel investors tell their stories in their own words. The reader learns in depth about the forces that create this investment opportunity in high-risk investing. The reader journeys through the investors’ hedging strategies, risk assessments, syndication orientation, financial return expectations, deal structuring preferences, monitoring investments, harvesting returns, and realistic exit strategies.

What’s more, many investors themselves do not understand the valuation process involved in "blue sky" deals where there are no historical financials available. The valuation process is an art form in early-stage investing and for the first time it is candidly reviewed.

Even more important is the due diligence process. Angel Financing answers the most basic questions that sometimes even investors are too embarrassed to ask. So for straight talk on how to make money in this market, get the insights of the successful investors who have made millions.

In the United States, two million investors possess the discretionary net worth necessary to invest in pre-IPO private placements. Why is it that only 250,000 to 300,000 are active each year? The reason is that these investors–while interested–do not understand the process, do not understand how to find the deal, do not know how to determine which deal justifies their efforts, and do not know how to develop a hedging strategy.

Whether you are a dreamer, dream maker, or providing services to either, Angel Financing is the ultimate practical reference guide to add to your professional business development library.

GERALD A. BENJAMIN is Senior Managing Partner of International Capital Resources, a capital sourcing firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. He is the founder of the largest database of angel investors in the United States and developed the largest investor-entrepreneur matching network in North America. Mr. Benjamin is publisher of the Private Equity Review, the Executive Director of the Northern California Venture Forum, and Executive Director of the Angel Capital Summit (the largest annual angel capital conference in the United States). He is also a founding partner in Angel Lake Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital fund specializing in medical, telecommunications, Internet and high-tech manuals.

Get the money your start-up business needs

"Finally, two experienced fundraising advisors demystify the process for entrepreneurs and individual investors. This should be required reading for ALL start-up companies because an outside capital investment is paramount to their existence." – Lori King CEO and Founder NVST.COM, Inc.

"Angel Financing presents an innovative capitalization strategy that works. Based on extensive academic research and filled with practical advice, it is an invaluable resource for all participants in the early-stage capital formation process." – E. Jeffrey Lyons Managing Director Marquette Consulting Group, Inc.

"I think Angel Financing must be read by all those looking to raise capital. It is also a great resource for those angel investors with little experience but the desire to get involved with early- stage companies." – George A. Mathews President Southwest Capital Resources, Inc.

"Angel Financing is the most comprehensive guide for private investments that I have seen. A must-read for angels and entrepreneurs!" – Jerry E. White Business Founder, Owner, and Chairman/CEO ICR Licensee

A successful financial planner is someone who does more than just crunch numbers and present an annual investment plan to clients. There is a psychological component to effective client care as well as to issues involving clients’ overall financial well-being. People skills, as well as financial planning skills, are necessary to build a successful financial planning business. This comprehensive guide teaches both new and veteran financial professionals how to relate to their clients in meaningful ways, thus growing their business by increasing the long-term retention of those clients. Offered here are insights into such issues as how to determine which clients to accept, how to propose a plan clients can use, how to tread carefully in family situations, how to develop sensitivity and communications skills, and how to work with the media and recognize the importance of building your business one lasting relationship at a time.

Karen Caplan Altfest, PhD, CFP (New York, NY), is Vice President of L. J. Altfest & Co., a financial planning and investment management firm. She is also the Director of the Financial Planning and Investments Program at the New School.

What distinguishes this book from other texts on mathematical finance is the use of both probabilistic and PDEs tools to price derivatives for both constant and stochastic volatility models, by which the reader has the advantage of computing explicitly a large number of prices for European, American and Asian derivatives.The book presents continuous time models for financial markets, starting from classical models such as Black-Scholes and evolving towards the most popular models today such as Heston and VAR.A key feature of the textbook is the large number of exercises, mostly solved, which are designed to help the reader to understand the material.The book is based on the author's lectures on topics on computational finance for senior and graduate students, delivered in USA (Princeton University and EMU), Taiwan and Kuwait. The prerequisites are an introductory course in stochastic calculus, as well as the usual calculus sequence.The book is addressed to undergraduate and graduate students in Masters of Finance programs as well as to those who wish to become more efficient in their practical applications.Topics covered:

Since 2007, the repeated financial crises around the world have brought to the headlines financial practices and models considered to fuel the economic instabilities. Deep Dive into Financial Models: Modeling Risk and Uncertainty comes handy in demystifying the underlying quantitative finance concepts. With a limited use of mathematical formalism, the book explains thoroughly the models, their hypotheses, principles and other building blocks. A particular care is given to model limitations and their misuse for investment strategies, asset pricing, or risk management. Its reader-friendly nature provides readers with a head start in quantitative finance.

The Complete Debt Relief Manual is the definitive guide to paying off and eliminating any kind of debt. Written from a procedure writer's perspective, it will guide you, with detailed steps, sample letters, and checklists, through the processes of budgeting, deciding the best way to pay off debts, negotiating settlements with credit card companies or the IRS without getting scammed by debt settlement or consolidation companies, dealing with debt collector calls and hassles, handling or avoiding lawsuits, determining whether or not to declare bankruptcy and how to avoid it, and repairing your credit and improving your credit score. Foreclosure is not dealt with due to its specialized nature and the risks involved of tackling it without an attorney. Born from the author's painful lessons learned and personal experience, The Compete Debt Relief Manual is a treasure of accurate and effective procedures to guide your every step on your journey to debt freedom.

When author and operational excellence consultant Menno R. van Dijk joined ING Domestic Bank in the Netherlands, the company had already been using the Lean system a few years. But van Dijk felt something was missing-the fun factor: experiments, improvements, a supportive management style, and teamwork. He wasn't seeing the sense of invigoration and renewal that comes when employees on the shop floor experience the improvement brought on by a Lean implementation.

He went to work and created a new approach-Super7-that took the Lean system in financial services to the next level. It radically reduced customer waiting times with less management and more responsibility on the shop floor. In Super7 Operations, he discusses Super7 in detail-how it was developed, what it does for customers, how it changes culture on the shop floor, and how it affects employees and managers. He explains its benefits, which include

flexible capacity to cope with fluctuating demand-no inventory, no waiting;

small, autonomous teams committed to getting the job done for their customers;

output management and delegated responsibilities; and

continuous improvement of performance without the need for tight controls.

Including case studies, this guide provides valuable tips and tricks for implementing Super7 in an organization that is looking for ways to improve their customers' experience.

Decision-makers in business and economics face a staggering array of problems. For example, managers of growing firms have to decide when to expand their business, governments have to decide whether to undertake large infrastructure investments, and managers of oil firms must decide how rapidly to deplete their reserves. While these problems seem quite diverse, they all share many important features. In each case, the decision-maker must choose when to take a particular action that will be potentially impossible to reverse, and the consequences of taking (or not taking) that action are uncertain. Also, the timing and nature of these actions directly affect the cash flows generated by the entities they manage. This book explains how techniques originally developed to price financial derivatives can be used to analyze real-world decisions, and provides the tools necessary to put them into practice.
The real options analysis approach to decision-making is built on strong theoretical foundations, and is widely discussed in practitioner literature, but often only at a fairly intuitive level. What practitioners need-and what this book delivers-is a structured approach to systematically applying real options analysis to the wide variety of problems they will meet in business and economics.
Real Options in Theory and Practice focuses on building up a general approach to solving real options problems from the ground up. Rather than aiming to build a "black box" to solve a small set of standardized real options problems, it describes the building blocks of any successful real options analysis and shows how they can be assembled in a way that is appropriate to the problem being analyzed. And for all of the numerical examples in the book, there is an accompanying CD that contains spreadsheets ready to use on the wide variety of applications the book brings into the picture. For both practitioners and academics, Real Options in Theory and Practice will serve as an authoritative and invaluable resource for those looking for effective and practical solutions to complex, real-life problems.

This book provides an effective antidote to the small business owner's frustration with government, demonstrating how to cut through regulations, red tape, and political corruption. Even as the American economy has slumped and every institution-private, municipal, and federal-strives to cut costs, government continues to grow more complex, intrusive, and expensive. Small businesses already bear a disproportionate share of regulatory costs and suffer more than large competitors when corruption distorts local markets. This situation will soon get worse: looming federal health care as well as environmental and financial mandates will push vast new oversight responsibilities into the states-and onto businesses' backs. Amy H. Handlin applies her 20 years' experience in state government and politics to provide this practical, results-oriented guide that teaches how to successfully navigate the jungle of overlapping federal, state, and municipal rules-skills that will become more essential as regulations balloon. Readers will learn how government works, get insight into the mindset of bureaucrats and politicians, and discover specific, nuts-and-bolts strategies for dealing with even the most unwelcoming, recalcitrant, or even dishonest officials. Provides model advocacy materials Includes end-of-chapter summaries that reinforce key concepts Presents vignettes dubbed "Tales from the Dark Side" that portray the worst in government bungling and help reinforce points in the text Contains a glossary clarifying common bureaucratic and political jargon

Microfinance investment funds are a recent development that will grow in importance. These funds expand the range of opportunities for financing microfinance institutions, enabling them to offer greater outreach and diversity of products for microentrepreneurs and small businesses. Microfinance now spans the range of finance, from the most simple enterprise to the complexity of capital markets. KfW actively promotes microfinance investment funds and other activities that facilitate the growth of microfinance. This book is an expression of KfW's role as information broker and trend setter. The authors who contributed to this collection offer a comprehensive range of perspectives and themes related to microfinance investment and its promotion.

Two of the most important factors contributing to national and international economy are processing of information for accurate financial forecasting and decision making as well as processing of information for efficient control of manufacturing systems for increased productivity. The associated problems are very complex and conventional methods often fail to produce acceptable solutions. Moreover, businesses and industries always look for superior solutions to boost profitability and productivity. In recent times, artificial neural networks have demonstrated promising results in solving many real-world problems in these domains, and these techniques are increasingly gaining business and industry acceptance among the practitioners. ""Artificial Neural Networks in Finance and Manufacturing"" presents many state-of-the-art and diverse applications to finance and manufacturing, along with underlying neural network theories and architectures. It offers researchers and practitioners the opportunity to access exciting and cutting-edge research focusing on neural network applications, combining two aspects of economic domain in a single and consolidated volume.

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.

This book brings together a good mix of academics and practitioners for a discussion that focuses on how to change financial practice and the academic field of finance in order to understand the current financial crisis and deal with future turbulent financial times. The volume is based on contributions by prominent academics and practitioners from Europe, Asia and the USA. The book contains several essays, most prominently by Maurizio Murgia, an internationally renowned European corporate finance scholar, and Robert E. Krainer, a senior professor with banking and business cycles research interest from University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book also deals with pedagogical, empirical and theoretical considerations in light of the crisis.

The prosperity and stability of any economic structure is reliant upon a foundation of secure systems that regulate the movement of money across the globe. These structures have become an integral part of contemporary society by reducing monetary risk and increasing financial security. Analyzing the Economics of Financial Market Infrastructures is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the current developments in financial systems and how these processes are evolving due to new regulations and technical advances. Featuring extensive coverage on a range of relevant topics on payment systems, central securities depositories, central counterparties, and trade repositories, this book is an essential reference source for professionals in the financial sector, analysts, IT professionals, and academicians concerned with emerging research on financial markets. This book features timely, research-based chapters on a variety of crucial topics including, but not limited to, payment timing, multi-layer networks, transaction simulations, payment system analysis, and regulation of financial marketplaces.

Meltdown reveals how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was able to curb important unsafe and unfair practices that led to the recent financial crisis. In interviews with key government, industry, and advocacy groups along with deep archival research, Kirsch and Squires show where the CFPB was able to overcome many abusive practices, where it was less able to do so, and why. Open for business in 2011, the CFPB was Congress's response to the financial catastrophe that shattered millions of middle-class and lower-income households and threatened the stability of the global economy. But only a few years later, with U.S. economic conditions on a path to recovery, there are already disturbing signs of the (re)emergence of the high-risk, high-reward credit practices that the CFPB was designed to curb. This book profiles how the Bureau has attempted to stop abusive and discriminatory lending practices in the mortgage and automobile lending sectors and documents the multilayered challenges faced by an untested new regulatory agency in its efforts to transform the broken—but lucrative—business practices of the financial services industry. Authors Kirsch and Squires raise the question of whether the consumer protection approach to financial services reform will succeed over the long term in light of political and business efforts to scuttle it. Case studies of mortgage and automobile lending reforms highlight the key contextual and structural conditions that explain the CFPB's ability to transform financial service industry business models and practices. Meltdown: The Financial Crisis, Consumer Protection, and the Road Forward is essential reading for a wide audience, including anyone involved in the provision of financial services, staff of financial services and consumer protection regulatory agencies, and fair lending and consumer protection advocates. Its accessible presentation of financial information will also serve students and general readers.

The book provides a detailed analysis of the nature and determinants of finance and trade and their relationship with Africa's competitiveness. Investment is examined in its various forms (financial vs. physical), and sources (private, public, domestic and FDI), as well as its relation to the size of domestic markets and export potential. The dimensions of trade related to financial development, trade costs, development of value chains and regional integration are also studied. The capacity of finance and investment to boost Africa's competitiveness is assessed to inform continent-wide economic policy.