The financial crisis that hit a number of economies of Asia in 1997 shocked the world. Financial Liberalization and the Asian Crisis rejects conventional explanations of the crisis as the outcome primarily of inefficient and corrupt economic systems in the countries concerned. It argues that the crisis was the result of premature and overly rapid financial liberalization in a world of increasing liquidity and volatility, and calls for a more cautious approach to financial liberalization, and reform of the international financial architecture.

This volume is specifically designed to assist the library media specialist in developing skills for project proposal writing. Blanche Woolls meticulously covers all steps, from developing an idea, finding a source of funding, writing and submitting a proposal, through managing a resource project. Beginning with an overview of the current funding situation, Woolls moves to the proposal itself. She discusses such aspects as stating a need, writing goals and objectives, and covers topics such as choosing personnel, itemizing the budget, evaluating the project, and reviewing the proposal itself. Woolls includes a discussion of funding sources other than government agencies, in which she provides suggestions for approaching private foundations and corporations. A bibliography and three appendixes concerning project management appear at the end of the book. Included among them are sample proposals which will serve as excellent models for new project proposals writers.

Essays on Money, Banking and Regulation honors the interests and achievements of the Dutch economist Conrad Oort. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 - Fiscal and monetary policy - reviews a variety of topics ranging from the measurement of money to the control and management of government expenditures. Part 2 - International institutions and international economic policy - looks at the international dimension of monetary and fiscal policy, with extensive discussion of the International Monetary Fund and the European Monetary Union. Part 3 - The future of international banking and the financial sector in the Netherlands - is an insider's view of the strategic choices facing financial institutions in the near future. Finally, Part 4 - Taxation and reforms in the Dutch tax system - is closest to Oort's research and practice since he has become known as an architect of the 1990 Dutch tax reform; this part is dedicated in particular to the tax reforms suggested by Oort.

Artificial intelligence is a consortium of data-driven methodologies which includes artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, probabilistic belief networks and machine learning as its components. We have witnessed a phenomenal impact of this data-driven consortium of methodologies in many areas of studies, the economic and financial fields being of no exception. In particular, this volume of collected works will give examples of its impact on the field of economics and finance. This volume is the result of the selection of high-quality papers presented at a special session entitled 'Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Finance' at the '2003 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence' (IC-AI '03) held at the Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 23-26 2003. The special session, organised by Jane Binner, Graham Kendall and Shu-Heng Chen, was presented in order to draw attention to the tremendous diversity and richness of the applications of artificial intelligence to problems in Economics and Finance. This volume should appeal to economists interested in adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of economic problems, computer scientists who are looking for potential applications of artificial intelligence and practitioners who are looking for new perspectives on how to build models for everyday operations.

There are still many important Artificial Intelligence disciplines yet to be covered. Among them are the methodologies of independent component analysis, reinforcement learning, inductive logical programming, classifier systems and Bayesian networks, not to mention many ongoing and highly fascinating hybridsystems. A way to make up for their omission is to visit this subject again later. We certainly hope that we can do so in the near future with another volume of 'Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Finance'.

Operational risk management is attracting the attention of academics and professionals worldwide. Academics are interested in this topic because it provides opportunities for the application of sophisticated statistical techniques, as well as lucrative opportunities for consultancy work and challenging questions on how to measure operational risk. For the practitioners, acquiring knowledge of operational risk is more than mere luxury as major banks all around the world have to be Basel 2 compliant within the next two years. Moreover, operational losses have, since the notorious collapse of Barings Bank, been haunting banks' top management, prompting a strive to devise measures that can reduce operational losses and the risk of business collapse. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that an operational loss event could lead to a fall in the market value of the affected firm that is greater than the loss itself. This new book is accessible to the average banker, while providing a general survey of the work on operational risk that academics will find invaluable.

From the start of the financial crisis in 2007, which turned into an economic crisis soon afterwards, it was obvious that public law could not prevent the genesis of this crisis although it has adequate instruments to make a reoccurrence of such a crisis unlikely. Financial law, tax law and even aspects of criminal law are designed to regulate the behaviour of financial institutions and other corporations. Since public law was unable to avoid the 2007 crisis, there can only be one conclusion: its instruments did not work properly or, worse, were badly designed or applied. Since 2007, a lot has been done from a financial, tax or criminal law point of view, confirming this finding. Regulation has thus been at the centre of the financial and legal debate, but a real understanding of the lessons of the crisis also requires account to be taken of private law. Is there a possible connection between private law and the outbreak of a financial and economic crisis? And did private law institutions, mechanisms or instruments in their current design contribute to the crisis? Does private law provide institutions, mechanisms and/or instruments which might have prevented the genesis of a financial or economic crisis? If so, why did these institutions, mechanisms and instruments fail to do so? And is there a need for new or modified instruments to improve the impact of private law on events that may lead to a new crisis? This thought-provoking book makes it clear that private law and the possibility of a financial and economic crisis are strongly intertwined. It shows that private law provides as many useful institutions, mechanisms and instruments against the emergence of such a crisis as public law does. Few other books bring together so many leading legal scholars on private law and its effects and implications. This book is rigorous, thoughtful, enlightening and thought-provoking - a must-read.

This is the first book in the Selecta, the collected works of Benoit Mandelbrot. This volume incorporates his original contributions to finance. The chapters consist of much new material prepared for this volume, as well as reprints of his classic papers which are devoted to the roles that discontinuity and related forms of concentration play in finance and economics. Much of this work helps to lay a foundation for evaluating risks in trading strategies.

The financial crisis prompted financial supervisors to take a critical look at their own performance.The "toolkit" available to supervisors is considerably more varied than it was a few years ago. Supervision has become more forward-looking, taking into account also soft controls, such as conduct and culture, corporate governance, and business models of financial institutions.This collection of essays discusses several significant changes in supervision methods and supervisory organisations and examines what methods contribute to good supervision and what can reasonably be expected of supervisors. The authors are experts in the field and most of them are affiliated to organisations responsible for financial supervision.

The papers collected in this volume are those presented at the fifteenth Colloquium arranged by the Societe Universitaire Europeenne de Recherches Financieres (SUERF), which took place in Nice in October 1989. The Society is supported by a large number of central banks and commercial banks, by other financial and business institutions and by personal subs criptions from academics and others interested in monetary and financial problems. Since its establishment in 1963, it has developed as a forum for the exchange of information, r esearch results and ideas among academics and practitioners in these fields, including central bank officials and civil servants responsible for formulating and applying monetary and financial policies, national and international. A major activity of SUERF is to organise and conduct Colloquia on subjects of topical interest to its members. The titles, places and dates of previous Colloquia for which volumes of the collected papers were published are noted on the last page of this volume. Volumes were not produced for Colloquia held at Tarragona, Spain in October 1970 under the title 'Monetary Policy and New Developments in Banking' and at Strasbourg, France in January 1972 under the title 'Aspects of European Monetary Union'."

What lies at the heart of financial regulation? Economic principles? Public interest motives? Bureaucratic procedures? Many academics have extensively written on financial regulation. Rarely, practitioners, and in particular European practitioners, have had their say, the opportunity to express their views on how financial regulation is and should be governed. The book attempts to fill that gap: heads of Securities Commissions, representatives of self-regulatory organizations and exchanges, lawyers, have debated on the different issues of regulation. They draw the lessons from their experience and their regulatory achievements.

The year 2000 is the centenary year of the publication of Bachelier's thesis which - together with Harry Markovitz Ph.D. dissertation on portfolio selection in 1952 and Fischer Black's and Myron Scholes' solution of an option pricing problem in 1973 - is considered as the starting point of modern finance as a mathematical discipline. On this remarkable anniversary the workshop on mathematical finance held at the University of Konstanz brought together practitioners, economists and mathematicians to discuss the state of the art. Apart from contributions to the known discrete, Brownian, and LA(c)vy process models, first attempts to describe a market in a reasonable way by a fractional Brownian motion model are presented, opening many new aspects for practitioners and new problems for mathematicians. As most dynamical financial problems are stochastic filtering or control problems many talks presented adaptations of control methods and techniques to the classical financial problems in a [ portfolio selection a [ irreversible investment a [ risk sensitive asset allocation a [ capital asset pricing a [ hedging contingent claims a [ option pricing a [ interest rate theory. The contributions of practitioners link the theoretical results to the steadily increasing flow of real world problems from financial institutions into mathematical laboratories. The present volume reflects this exchange of theoretical and applied results, methods and techniques that made the workshop a fruitful contribution to the interdisciplinary work in mathematical finance.

This volume contains contributions on a range of important issues in current financial research. Topics included are - the performance of fixed income mutual funds in different economic states, the determinants of long-term excess performance of the ADRs on the NYSE, the models for forecasting the Euro/US Dollar exchange rates and the U.S. mutual funds movements, the fragmentation in day and night markets, the market reactions of the U.S.-listed foreign banks to the passage of the GLB Act of 1999, the upper bounds for American options, the spread-based models for the valuation of credit derivatives, the empirical evidence on the evolution of corporate borrowers, the determinants of private debt source, and the underlying causes and resolution policies for the systematic banking crises. This is a valuable addition to the research of finance. It contains contributions from key figures the world of finance; and offers broad coverage.

Redefining Financial Services explores the fundamental redefinition of the role of financial intermediaries in the new century. Combining empirical knowledge with a historical approach, the author reveals that seven centuries of advances in technology have changed the nature of financial services very little. Examining the state of financial services today in the context of the new economy's evolution, Joe DiVanna investigates what changes are happening in the financial industry, where they are occurring, how they are materializing and, more importantly, why.

Sovereign risk and financial crises play a key role in current international economic developments, particularly in the case of economic downturns. As the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s revealed once again, financial crises are the rule rather than the exception in capitalist economies. The event also revealed that international public debt agreements are contingent claims. In a world of increasing economic interdependencies, the issues of financial crises and country defaults are of critical importance. This volume goes to the heart of the academic discussion on sovereign risk and financial crises by centering on quantitative-empirical aspects, evaluating prominent approaches, and by proposing new methods. Part I of the volume identifies key factors and processes that are central in analyzing sovereign risk while Part II focuses on the determinants and effects of financial crises.

The essential premise of this book is that theory and practice are equally important in describing financial modeling. In it the authors try to strike a balance in their discussions between theories that provide foundations for financial models and the institutional details that provide the context for applications of the models. The book presents the financial models of stock and bond options, exotic options, investment grade and high-yield bonds, convertible bonds, mortgage-backed securities, liabilities of financial institutions -- the business model and the corporate model. It also describes the applications of the models to corporate finance. Furthermore, it relates the models to financial statements, risk management for an enterprise, and asset/liability management with illiquid instruments. The financial models are progressively presented from option pricing in the securities markets to firm valuation in corporate finance, following a format to emphasize the three aspects of a model: the set of assumptions, the model specification, and the model applications. Generally, financial modeling books segment the world of finance as "investments," "financial institutions," "corporate finance," and "securities analysis," and in so doing they rarely emphasize the relationships between the subjects. This unique book successfully ties the thought processes and applications of the financial models together and describes them as one process that provides business solutions. Created as a companion website to the book readers can visit www.thomasho.com to gain deeper understanding of the book's financial models. Interested readers can build and test the models described in the book using Excel, and they can submit their models to the site. Readers can also use the site's forum to discuss the models and can browse server based models to gain insights into the applications of the models. For those using the book in meetings or class settings the site provides Power Point descriptions of the chapters. Students can use available question banks on the chapters for studying.

The papers in this volume were presented at three invited sessions at the annual meeting of the Western Economic Association in Lake Tahoe, Nevada on June 30 and July 1, 1998. The comments of the speaker at each of these sessions are also included.

The papers focus on the widespread banking and financial crises that have plagued many countries worldwide. A study by the International Monetary Fund (Lindgren, Garcia, & Saal, 1996) reported that banking crises had been experienced by nearly three-quarters of its 180-plus member countries since 1980. And this was before the current problems in Korea and Southeast Asia. Only the African continent, where banking systems are generally quite primitive, appears to have been unaffected.

The papers in this volume amplify on the evidence in this area for additional countries; expand the earlier analyses; describe, discuss, and evaluate alternative procedures for resolving bank insolvencies and recapitalizing the banking system, and suggest ways of maintaining bank solvency and preventing reoccurrences of these costly crises.

The papers are timely, add considerably to our storehouse of knowledge, and are likely to be of particular value to policy makers, bankers, and fellow researchers.

Presenting state-of-the-art methods in the area, the book begins with a presentation of weak discrete time approximations of jump-diffusion stochastic differential equations for derivatives pricing and risk measurement. Using a moving least squares reconstruction, a numerical approach is then developed that allows for the construction of arbitrage-free surfaces. Free boundary problems are considered next, with particular focus on stochastic impulse control problems that arise when the cost of control includes a fixed cost, common in financial applications. The text proceeds with the development of a fear index based on equity option surfaces, allowing for the measurement of overall fear levels in the market. The problem of American option pricing is considered next, applying simulation methods combined with regression techniques and discussing convergence properties. Changing focus to integral transform methods, a variety of option pricing problems are considered. The COS method is practically applied for the pricing of options under uncertain volatility, a method developed by the authors that relies on the dynamic programming principle and Fourier cosine series expansions. Efficient approximation methods are next developed for the application of the fast Fourier transform for option pricing under multifactor affine models with stochastic volatility and jumps. Following this, fast and accurate pricing techniques are showcased for the pricing of credit derivative contracts with discrete monitoring based on the Wiener-Hopf factorisation. With an energy theme, a recombining pentanomial lattice is developed for the pricing of gas swing contracts under regime switching dynamics. The book concludes with a linear and nonlinear review of the arbitrage-free parity theory for the CDS and bond markets.

Academics and practitioners from a range of institutions across Europe provide a cutting-edge, practical, and comprehensive review on the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. From sourcing and obtaining funds, to financial tools for growing and managing the financial challenges and opportunities of the startup, Entrepreneurial Finance: The Art and Science of Growing Ventures is an engaging text that will equip entrepreneurs, students and early-stage investors to make sound financial decisions at every stage of a business' life. Largely reflecting European businesses and with a European perspective, the text is grounded in sound theoretical foundations. Case studies and success stories, as well as perspectives from the media and from experts, provide real-world applications, while a wealth of activities give students abundant opportunities to apply what they have learned. A must-have text for both graduate and undergraduate students in entrepreneurship, finance and management programs, as well as aspiring entrepreneurs in any field.

This book presents a forecasting mechanism of the price intervals for deriving the SCR (solvency capital requirement) eradicating the risk during the exercise period on one hand and measuring the risk by computing the hedging exit time function associating with smaller investments the date until which the value of the portfolio hedges the liabilities on the other. This information, summarized under the term "tychastic viability measure of risk" is an evolutionary alternative to statistical measures, when dealing with evolutions under uncertainty. The book is written by experts in the field and the target audience primarily comprises research experts and practitioners.