The book covers alternative lending using the emergence of Debt Funds in the EU as a case study. The book explores the risks that they can pose to financial stability, and the regulatory and supervisory tools available to mitigate these risks. Through this analysis, the book uncovers the risks and potential risk mitigation tools that can be applied to the alternative lenders-including debt funds and other potential alternative lenders. After identifying the reasons behind the growth of alternative lenders (using as example the assets of Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) and in particular debt funds) and the simultaneous decrease of the banks' assets, the book analyses the systemic importance of the alternative lenders and the risk channels through which the systemic risk can spread to the banking sector and the financial system. Then, the book deals with the financial innovation-market failure theory and demonstrates that financial innovations (e.g. debt funds, securitisations) can cause market failures, resulting in regulatory interventions. Of interest to banking and financial regulation academics, researchers, and practitioners this book analyses the regulatory provisions in place for both credit institutions and debt funds, including the Basel Accords, the Capital Requirements Directives and Regulations, and the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) and its implementation in various EU jurisdictions, before offering a proposal for a new three-defensive framework applicable to debt funds and to other potential alternative lenders.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in index number and aggregation theory, since the two previously divergent fields have been successfully unified. The underlying aggregator functions which are weakly separable subfunctions of utility and production functions, are the building blocks of economic theory, and the derivation of index numbers based upon their ability to track those building blocks is now called the "economic theory of index numbers."

William Barnett, the coeditor of this volume, introduced modern economic index number theory into monetary economics. His merger of economic index number theory, with monetary theory was based upon the use of Diewert's approach to producing "superlative" nonparametric approximations to the theoretically exact aggregator functions. This book comprises a focussed and unified collection of Barnett's most important publications in this area.

The papers in the book have been organized into logical sections, with unifying introductions and overviews. The result is a systematic development of the state of the art in monetary and financial aggregation theory. The sections cover the origin of the user cost price of monetary services. Exact aggregation of monetary assets on the demand side for consumers and firms, and on the supply side for financial intermediaries, general equilibrium of all economic agents' demands and supplies, dynamic solution of the exact system, and extension to monetary aggregation under risk. The extension of index number theory to the case of risk is completely general, and can be applied to tracking any exact economic aggregator under risk. In all cases, the criterion used for evaluation isthe tracking ability of the approximation to the exact aggregator function of economic theory.

Many of the empirical and policy puzzles in monetary economics disappear when simple sum monetary aggregates are replaced by index numbers that are coherent with theory. Simple sum monetary aggregates became incoherent with theory, when monetary assets began paying interest and therefore could no longer be viewed as perfect substitutes.

This is a useful tool to those associated with economics departments within universities, business schools, central banks and federal governments, financial institutions including underwriters, bankers and stockbrokers.

It is becoming more and more difficult to find well-managed companies in today's business world. The recent financial blowups demonstrate the overriding lack of respect for shareholders. For their own benefit, management risks shareholder assets without restraint. If the risky bets pay off, bonuses are awarded. If the risky bets fail, it is no loss to management and they may just get a hefty severance package in the process. However, from back in the 1960s, one man, Warren Buffett, has dedicated himself completely to his shareholders. In managing Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett took a company worth $40 per share and built it into an empire worth close to $100,000 per share in today's market. In spite of this incredible success, very few of Buffett's actions are replicated in modern business practices. Building the Next Berkshire Hathaway outlines the business principles that helped establish this company as one of the best run in U.S. history. Whether you are an investor who wants to be able to recognize the potential for business success or an executive ready to establish policies that benefit your shareholders, this book is an indispensable resource. There are a number of books that will tell you how to invest like Warren Buffett-this book takes it a step further to show how his success as a CEO was tied to his treatment of shareholders.

Critically acclaimed investigative reporter and CNBC personality Charles Gasparino demonstrates how the ongoing tumult in financial markets is part of a much larger story that entails some of the world's most esteemed financial institutions selling out their responsibility - not just to their own shareholders, but to millions of outside investors and to the American public. "The Sellout" shows how and why America's largest investment banks have suffered staggering losses in assets and influence, triggering the vast financial crisis that is now devastating the United States and institutions across the globe. This page-turning narrative captures how avarice, arrogance, and sheer stupidity eroded Wall Street's dominance, made many of the US' most fabled financial institutions vulnerable to significant new foreign control, and profoundly weakened the financial security of millions of poor and middle-class American families.

Building upon Feltham and Ohlson models, this book examines positive loss-earnings within the context of the dot.com bubble during the boom years of the late 1990s bull market. The strong demand for equity financing captured the imagination of investors from Europe and U.S. like never before. With a focus on U.S. Internet companies, the book explores both the birth and the death of the new economy, and how negative earnings and losses still garnered large investments and successful IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). As Internet based ventures and the digital economy keep attracting large amounts of equity financing, this book explains that there is something unique in the valuation and pricing of tech companies. The book was written for corporate financiers, capital market professionals, and academics to further their understanding of equity valuation and the effects of equity trading.

This book starts from the application scenarios of artificial financial intelligence regulation, commercial banking, wealth management and payments, etc., and makes a detailed study of the main scenarios of the application of China's artificial intelligence in the financial field, and also analysis specific application cases of China.With the popularization of smart phones and the rapid development of e-commerce, mobile payment, big data and other technologies are in the ascendant in China in recent years. In particular, artificial intelligence technologies in the form of facial, speech and semantic recognition are showing preliminary advantages in the field of FinTech, and the future era of Intelligent Finance has quietly come. The Chinese government has clearly put forward "China should rely on a robust cycle of domestic demand and innovation as the main driver of the economy while maintaining foreign markets and investors as a second engine of growth", science and technology innovation is the basic motivation of economic and social cycle, to implement the " dual circulation strategy ", it is necessary to understand the key role of scientific and technological innovation in financial innovation services, and improve financial services must be driven by science and technology. There is a natural relationship between artificial intelligence and financial services, because financial services are credit and information intermediaries, and data is the most critical for finance, while artificial intelligence has a super ability in dealing with complex data. At present, many Chinese Banks have applied artificial intelligence to their daily operations and management, such as accurate customer identification, enhanced process tracking, intelligent marketing, and product process transformation, so as to simplify financial service processes and shorten service cycles. In General, this book both pays attention to practical application and theoretical, which is a useful reference book in theoretical research and practical work, and also helps readers to understand the application of intelligent finance in China.

Connects the literature on public policy and cryptocurrency, examining the governance and democracy implications of the rise in cryptocurrency use Explores cryptocurrency's current and potential impacts on principles such as equity and inclusion, efficiency and effectiveness, accountability, and quality of life Covers a range of public policy and public administration issues, offering readers an understanding of how cryptocurrency intersects with democracy, governance, fiscal and monetary policies, economic growth, corruption, and privacy.

Japan experienced a remarkable growth in international finance, through a series of liberalization measures in the 1980s. However, her position in the global financial system is still limited, as the reserve currency share of yen illustrates. Why does such a contrast exist? Historical comparison with Britain and the United States as well as extensive data provide a key to answer the question.

Easy to follow, friendly, and conversational How to Talk Finance will help you get the low down on the numbers behind your business -what they are, what they mean and how you can use them to get ahead.

This book examines the crisis at the famous insurance market, Lloyd's of London, during the late twentieth century, which nearly destroyed the 300-year-old institution. While rapid structural change resulting from system collapse is less common in insurance than in the history of other financial services, one exception was the Lloyd's crisis. Hitherto, explanations of the crisis have focused on the effects of catastrophic losses and poor governance. By drawing on contemporary accounts of the crisis, the author constructs the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the public and political response. The book applies theoretical concepts from behavioural economics and economic psychology to argue that multiple delusions of competence were at work both within and outside the Lloyd's market. Arrogance, elitism and defence of vested interests comprised endogenous elements of the crisis. Entrenched ideas about the virtues of self-regulation and faith in insider experts also played a role. The result was a misdiagnosis by both insiders and politicians of what ailed Lloyd's and a series of reforms that failed to address the underlying causes of its disease. This book offers a salutary lesson from recent history about the importance of the transparency, accountability and effective monitoring of financial institutions. It is of interest to academics and students of economic and financial history, business, insurance, political economy and history.

This book examines financial vulnerability: a state in which a person or household cannot absorb any substantial spending or negative income shock without substantial financial and ultimately broader harm such as job loss, emotional harm, or mental illness. The focus of the book is on the experiences of low- income and modest income Canadian families - families which, by virtue of being in the lower income brackets, are particularly at risk of experiencing financial hardship. Looking at vulnerability from a conceptual and empirical lens, this book offers a framework to better understand the complex and interdependent ways in which financial vulnerability emerge and can be addressed. By locating its analysis of individual and household financial management in wider community, cultural, and economic contexts, this book seeks to offer holistic policy recommendations to reduce financial vulnerability, with implications that go beyond Canada and to other developed countries.

The digital revolution is changing our world and the fundamentals of business faster than anyone expected, and the responsibility for leading key aspects of enterprise-wide business transformation often falls to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This book provides motivation and guidance for current and future finance leaders to navigate an increasingly unpredictable, dynamic, complex and connected world. As businesses are forced to change fundamentally or accept the reality of being left behind, the CFO has a particularly important part to play in preparing for this change - not only for their own function but for the business as a whole. So what is the role of CFOs in delivering digital business transformation? What can they do to manage business resources and performance more dynamically? How can CFOs contribute to the creation and management of new business models, such as digital business platforms and ecosystems? And what can finance leaders do to enable sustainable growth and long-term multi-stakeholder value creation? These and many more key questions are tackled in The Contemporary CFO, which draws on practical experience of transforming leading global businesses and on extensive, original research, including in-depth interviews with a wide range of corporate leaders. CFOs are used to managing change but delivering a complex business transformation on top of an already demanding role can be challenging. This essential guide includes the latest thinking, trends and perspectives to help finance leaders navigate the demands of the connected world successfully.

The monetary system is at a turning point. The question is no longer if, but how soon countries will roll out a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). This book discusses the recomposition of the money supply from the present bank money regime to a monetary system determined by CBDC. As the book sets out, the future of money is going to be digital and sovereign. Nonetheless, the relationship between the various types of money is competitive rather than being the peaceful coexistence that was officially envisaged. CBDC competes with the incumbent bank money as well as with private cryptocurrencies that are challenging both central-bank money as well as bank money. For technological and political reasons, bank money will not be able to emulate the superior properties of sovereign digital tokens. Uncovered and unwarranted cryptocurrencies, too, will not stand the competition in the long run. The shifts in the monetary system are changing the role of central banks in the interplay of monetary, fiscal and private-creditary functions and open up improved options for monetary policy. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and policymakers in monetary and financial economics, and digital currencies.

This open access book is the first attempt to elaborate the formalization phase of banking supervision in eight developed countries-USA, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and UK. This innovative study in the field of banking supervision history identifies why national histories of banking supervision share similarities, but also remain different and are heavily path dependent. This book will be of great interest not only to financial/economic historians but also to general readers interested in banking supervision, i.e., students, bankers, supervisors, and international officials.

There are ten papers in this volume. They are:

1. An Empirical Examination of The Intraday Return Volatility Process.
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the distributional and time-series properties of intraday returns. The purpose is to determine whether a GARCH model that allows for time variance in a process can adequately represent intraday return volatility.
2. The Valuation of New Product Introduction Under Uncertain Competition: A Real Option Approach.
This paper investigates how a stochastic competition process in a two-factor real option model could affect the value of future product development opportunities. Our results also indicate that product development opportunities are more valuable: (1) in a more volatile environment; (2) when the window of opportunities is longer; and (3) when the competitive intensity is lower.
3. Earnings, Dividends, and Equity Value of Multinational Firms.
This paper develops and tests a valuation model, whose main prediction is that equity value is a function of earnings, dividends and book value, where the function depends on the relative level of multinationality.
4. Benford's Law and Its Application in Financial Fraud Detection.
This paper has discussed Benford's law, which explains that the leading (first or leftmost) digit in a series of natural numbers is not evenly distributed among the digits 1 to 9. The main purpose of this study actually seeks to explore a new methodological approach to datamining that can be of some real practical value; especially to the auditors and forensic accountants in detecting financial frauds.
5. Estimation of the Degree of Integration in the U.S. MaturityRates Using Semiparametric Techniques.
This paper examines the order of integration of several U.S. Treasury maturity rates by means of using semiparametric techniques. The results show that the order of integration of the one and three year maturity rates is strictly above 1. It oscillates around one in case of the five-year rate, and the values are strictly below 1 (and thus showing mean reversion), for the seven and ten-year rates.
6. On Country-Fund Price Behavior-An Empirical Analysis of Cointegrating Factors.
This paper provides empirical evidence on the price behavior of closed-end country funds. Using the data from 47 closed-end single-country funds, we examine three Cointegrating factors to describe the long-run behavior of country-fund share prices. They are: the net asset value (NAV), foreign stock-market indexes, and the U.S. stock market index.
7. Strategic Capital Budgeting: the Abandonment Option with Political Risk.
This paper investigates the strategic role of political risk and timing in the capital budgeting process that includes both investment and disinvestments. The model developed in the paper highlights the role of the probability of an investment ending political event in the capital budgeting process.
8. Time Series Model Complexity and Firm Valuation: the Case of AR1 Firms Versus Non-AR1 Firms.
This study examines the effect of the complexity of quarterly earnings generating time series models on firm valuation. The examination is limited to the comparison between AR1 firms and non-AR1 firms, and the evaluations are based on the levels approach. Results consistently show that the association between quarterly stock prices andquarterly earnings is higher for AR1 firms than that for non-AR1 firms. The effect of firm size is also investigated.
9. Debt Covenant Violation and the Value Relevance of Accounting Information.
This study documents that investors exercise their liquidation option on firms facing less severe financial distress than bankruptcy filings. This study finds that the valuation shift from earnings to book value of equity in the violation manifestation period is reversed in the post-violation recovery period. This suggests that the valuation distortion in the pre-violation period is temporary rather than permanent.
10. What's Next: Merger in the Lebanese Banking Sector.
This paper studies banking preference and behavior of Lebanese people. If small banks are to survive, the findings of the study reaffirm the importance of vertically merging banks in Lebanon. The reliance on digital technology is increasing every day. To deepen the problem, small Lebanese banks are finding themselves in a digital environment that affects their ability to compete in a fierce environment.

Economists broadly define financial asset price bubbles as episodes in which prices rise with notable rapidity and depart from historically established asset valuation multiples and relationships. Financial economists have for decades attempted to study and interpret bubbles through the prisms of rational expectations, efficient markets, equilibrium, arbitrage, and capital asset pricing models, but they have not made much if any progress toward a consistent and reliable theory that explains how and why bubbles (and crashes) evolve and are defined, measured, and compared. This book develops a new and different approach that is based on the central notion that bubbles and crashes reflect urgent short-side rationing, which means that, as such extreme conditions unfold, considerations of quantities owned or not owned begin to displace considerations of price.

Microfinance is a renowned albeit controversial solution for giving financial access to the unbanked, even if micro-transactions increase costs, limiting outreach potential. The economic and financial sustainability of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) is a prerequisite for widening a potentially unlimited client base. Automation decreases costs, expanding the outreach potential, and improving transparency and efficiency. Technological solutions range from branchless mobile banking to geo-localization of customers, digital/social networking for group lending, blockchain validation, big data, and artificial intelligence, up to "MicroFinTech" - FinTech applications adapted to microfinance. Of interest to both scholars, students, and professors of financial technology and microfinance, this book examines these trendy solutions comprehensively, going beyond the existing literature and showing potential applications to the traditional sustainability versus outreach trade-off.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the financial systems of major industrialized countries using the statistical framework of the financial accounts. After a discussion of how economists agreed to create a framework to monitor the financial linkages between surplus and deficit sectors, the book analyzes in detail the composition and the recent evolution of financial assets and liabilities for households (including public pension rights), firms and intermediaries. Next, the volume studies the convergence patterns of financial structures and their influence on the effectiveness of monetary policy within European countries. The final chapter unifies the previous pictures, showing how the effects of financial integration and global imbalances could have been foreseen based on the financial accounts. The analysis and information contained in the book will help the readers to understand many issues and challenges raised by the recent financial crisis.

This book aims to systematically assess laws and practices, close gaps that currently prevent a full profiling of financial participation, provide a description of individual countries against the background of comparable scores for the EU 27 and to promote a common platform for financial participation within the European Union.

The benchmark approach provides a general framework for financial market modeling, which extends beyond the standard risk-neutral pricing theory. It permits a unified treatment of portfolio optimization, derivative pricing, integrated risk management and insurance risk modeling. The existence of an equivalent risk-neutral pricing measure is not required. Instead, it leads to pricing formulae with respect to the real-world probability measure. This yields important modeling freedom which turns out to be necessary for the derivation of realistic, parsimonious market models. The first part of the book describes the necessary tools from probability theory, statistics, stochastic calculus and the theory of stochastic differential equations with jumps. The second part is devoted to financial modeling by the benchmark approach. Various quantitative methods for the real-world pricing and hedging of derivatives are explained. The general framework is used to provide an understanding of the nature of stochastic volatility. The book is intended for a wide audience that includes quantitative analysts, postgraduate students and practitioners in finance, economics and insurance. It aims to be a self-contained, accessible but mathematically rigorous introduction to quantitative finance for readers that have a reasonable mathematical or quantitative background. Finally, the book should stimulate interest in the benchmark approach by describing some of its power and wide applicability.

This book proposes a new capital asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM that outperforms other popular models in empirical tests using US stock returns. The ZCAPM is derived from Fischer Black's well-known zero-beta CAPM, itself a more general form of the famous capital asset pricing model (CAPM) by 1990 Nobel Laureate William Sharpe and others. It is widely accepted that the CAPM has failed in its theoretical relation between market beta risk and average stock returns, as numerous studies have shown that it does not work in the real world with empirical stock return data. The upshot of the CAPM's failure is that many new factors have been proposed by researchers. However, the number of factors proposed by authors has steadily increased into the hundreds over the past three decades. This new ZCAPM is a path-breaking asset pricing model that is shown to outperform popular models currently in practice in finance across different test assets and time periods. Since asset pricing is central to the field of finance, it can be broadly employed across many areas, including investment analysis, cost of equity analyses, valuation, corporate decision making, pension portfolio management, etc. The ZCAPM represents a revolution in finance that proves the CAPM as conceived by Sharpe and others is alive and well in a new form, and will certainly be of interest to academics, researchers, students, and professionals of finance, investing, and economics.

This volume consists of original research articles examining timely issues in financial services, asset pricing, and hedging. The articles in the first part of the volume deal with methods for assessing the safety and soundness of banks, rationales for and economic consequences of bank mergers, valuation effects of lender environmental liability, option-theoretic explanations of the closed-end mutual fund discount, and contingent-claims analysis of price-matching refunds. Articles in the second part of the volume study consumption smoothing and the equity premium puzzle, the yield spread of tax-deductible preferred stock, fitting a jump-diffusion model of currency futures options, duration effects on hedge ratios of currency futures, and dynamics between foreign exchange and stock markets in Southeast Asian economies.