In the face of the recent financial crisis there is increased focus on long-term investment strategies. This is particularly true for institutional investors who manage our retirement savings. Simultaneously there is increased demand that financial assets be invested with an understanding of long-term environmental and social sustainability. Responsible investing provides a long-term sustainable investment strategy that values environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in investment decision-making. Responsible Investing has always had a broad mandate. Put simply, it is a long-term sustainable investment strategy that seeks to reduce risk in investment portfolios through managing ESG issues in today 's corporations. The Next Generation of Responsible Investment explores this topic in an edited volume intended for those with an interest in finance and business.

This book recommends and examines the various approaches to incorporating an accurate measure of risk into the appraisal of an international investment. It considers the way in which decisions on international investment projects are taken and how they should be. It critiques and integrates existing theories, including the global capital asset pricing rule of financial theory, theories of strategy making and the real options approach, to show how risk should be incorporated into the present value formula and its various elements to produce a clear decision rule.

"Corporate Governance" is a new text which considers the problems surrounding governance and proposes solutions to help restore investor confidence in the corporate world. The book is intended for board members, corporate executives, regulators, auditors, creditors and analysts seeking a concise analysis of the governance issues facing financial and nonfinancial corporations round the world. The book is fully international in context and includes real life examples and cases to emphasize the practical nature of governance problems and solutions.

Since the publication of the 2nd edition of The Credit Risk of Complex Derivatives in 1997, the world of derivatives has gone through a period of dramatic change in the external operating environment, product and market characteristic and risk management techniques. In the light of these changes, the text has been substantially reorganized, updated and expanded. Several new chapters have been added including: derivative losses risk governance and risk management efforts regulatory initiatives and advances credit risk portfolio models Aimed at clients, intermediaries and regulators, this new edition will be focussed clearly on risk education, risk management and risk disclosure in order to make participation in derivatives more secure, transparent, efficient and beneficial. MARKET 1: Senior Managers; Risk Managers; Compliance Managers; Consultants; Trading and Sales Staff; Quantitative Analysts; Credit Analysts; Regulators MARKET 2: MBA courses

This book analyzes Africa's unprecedented economic growth, the state of its financial sector, and the varied opportunities for Islamic finance investors. It considers the role - potential and realized - of Islamic finance in fostering financial inclusion in areas such as banking, microfinance, capital market development, insurance, and private equity business. The book stresses that investing in Africa through Islamic finance will open new markets, ensure higher profit margins, diversify risk, and create business competition; and that these changes that will provide financial products that can satisfying the desires and beliefs of all consumers and unlock the real potential of the continent's financial system. The book also looks into the rise of international interest in Africa and concludes by scrutinizing the challenges impeding further economic growth, as well as the specific barriers that need to be addressed in order to promote the implementation of Islamic finance. Investors, policymakers, and academics ready to confront these challenges will find much of value in this book.

A state-of-the art treatment offering scientific procedures that require no special scientific expertise, Murphy's unusual new book provides a unified framework for the evaluation of investment assets and strategies--a particularly useful way to conduct security analysis, portfolio management, and trading, and for other general investment applications. Murphy covers practical methods for credit analysis and demonstrates ways to value equities using a pro forma model that integrates forecasting with the detailed use of financial statements and footnotes.

"Scientific Investment Analysis" explains how to evaluate both fixed income securities and equities, as well as options, futures, and investment companies. It illustrates the use of practical dynamic software for valuing complex call, conversion, and other option features embedded in security contracts. The valuation concepts he presents are well grounded in theory and empirical investigation and explained within the context of international portfolio management. The effects of trading, tax, and regulatory environments on market prices and investment strategies are thoroughly discussed. This is an important resource for investment analysts, researchers, advisers, and brokers, an as excellent text for students in advanced investment or portfolio management at upper university levels.

This book mainly addresses the general equilibrium asset pricing method in two aspects: option pricing and variance risk premium. First, volatility smile and smirk is the famous puzzle in option pricing. Different from no arbitrage method, this book applies the general equilibrium approach in explaining the puzzle. In the presence of jump, investors impose more weights on the jump risk than the volatility risk, and as a result, investors require more jump risk premium which generates a pronounced volatility smirk. Second, based on the general equilibrium framework, this book proposes variance risk premium and empirically tests its predictive power for international stock market returns.

Shareholder activism in Korea has been commended by Western economists. A prominent leader is the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), a civil society organization. How could the activism led by a civil society organization grow and thrive in the poor soil of Korea to become the success story of corporate governance reform in developing countries? This book examines shareholder activism and investigates three elements of social movement theory - political opportunity, framing process and resource mobilization - to explain this phenomenon.

Service activities such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, business auditing, distribution, trading, and other services have been at the forefront of the transformation process in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. These reforms, though far from complete, are now sufficiently advanced to draw lessons and to identify strategic options for foreign service firms expanding in the region. In this volume, leading analysts and practitioners offer an appraisal of the service markets and the challenges related to foreign entry into the services sector in Central and Eastern Europe during the "second wave" of transformation. What is the emerging pattern of change? What is the outlook for promising business in the area of services? Which entry strategies have proven particularly successful? How do the leading service providers from the West deal with the challenges confronting them in service markets of the region?

This collective volume used case studies, field research and industry studies to consider strategic options for foreign service firms in East Central and Eastern Europe for the late nineties and beyond.

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the major economic indicators in the US and the Euro Zone. Following an introduction to the construction of indicators and the basic concepts behind their use, the specific characteristics of the two currency areas are analyzed, and the most important economic indicators and their significance are explained. The author has developed a unique rating system for economic indicators that enables readers to establish the relative importance of 'market movers'. The book also contains an extensive overview of the Datastream mnemonics, making it an essential tool for those conducting investment research.

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe--and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest. This is one of the biggest debates in economics and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo cuts through this debate with a new framework, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, in which rationality and irrationality coexist. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency isn't wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought--a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. A fascinating intellectual journey filled with compelling stories, Adaptive Markets starts with the origins of market efficiency and its failures, turns to the foundations of investor behavior, and concludes with practical implications--including how hedge funds have become the Galapagos Islands of finance, what really happened in the 2008 meltdown, and how we might avoid future crises. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions in economics, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how markets really work.

Making your capital work hard has never been more important than it is today. Investment trusts, often over looked as an investing vehicle, are a key tool in getting better returns on your money.

The Financial Times Guide to Investment Trusts is your concise and jargon free introduction to one of the City’s best kept secrets. It explains how investment trusts differ from unit trusts and OEICs and explores the pros and cons of investment trusts including their superior performance. It also helps you identify your investment objectives, discusses the basic principles of successful investing, and how to run a trust portfolio.

Whether you are a novice DIY investor or have many years’ experience and wish to question the experts; the FT Guide to Investment Trusts:

• Provides a detailed overview of what investment trusts are and how they differ from other funds
• Examines the factors which help to explain the better performance of trusts – including cheaper fees, discounts and gearing
• Analyses the stepping stones to successful investing
• Shows you how to construct and monitor a trust portfolio
• Highlights the workings of two live and benchmarked portfolios which John has been sharing with Investor Chronicle readers over the years.

Despite Keynes' achievement in developing his theory of monetary economy, he failed to integrate some important real effects investment into his analysis. Specifically, he neglected the role of replacement investment, although his anticipations of the q-theory laid the groundwork for a theory of replacement investment.;This book integrates Keynes' observations about the q-theory into a coherent theory of replacement investment. It demonstrates why, in the absence of a significant post-war depression, business was relieved of the need to replace obsolete capital goods, thereby leading the economy into a period of prolonged stagnation.;Michael Perelman is the author of several books including "Karl Marx's Crisis Theory - Labor, Scarcity and Fictitious Capital".

The authors provide the reader with an extensive tool set for active and successful management of fixed income portfolios as well as for credits. The focus of discussion is on quantitative and, for credits, qualitative methods of portfolio management. These strategies may be employed for portfolio diversification and in order to outperform the benchmark. Methods applicable for different risk factors - duration, yield curve, basis, volatility and credit management - are illustrated in detail using a top-down and bottom-up approach.

This book reports on foreign investments in transitional economies and the corporate governance of international strategic alliances in China. It throws new light on the relationship between ownership, corporate governance, international technology transfer, organizational learning and the performance of such alliances. The book reviews the problems encountered by these international strategic alliances, provides significant empirical evidence of foreign investment decisions and profiles corporate governance and organizational learning in strategic alliances. Based on research into 1000 firms in China, it draws important conclusions for theory and practice.

This comprehensive book presents an accessible guide to Risk Management and Trading applications for the Electricity Markets in a practical manner. Various methodologies developed over the last few years are considered and current literature is reviewed. Fiorenzani emphasizes the relationships between trading, hedging and generation asset management. With its clear structure and well researched text, this is an invaluable asset to Investment Professionals, Research Analysts, Energy CEO's & Risk Management Professionals. It would also be an invaluable text for postgraduates in energy finance.

This book integrates socially responsible investment into modern portfolio theory from a multi-criteria perspective. Socially responsible investment is a "new deal" championed by the institutional investment and bank sectors, agents that influence mutual funds and other collective investment schemes and which fear that financial strategies without ethical constraints can harm sustainable growth and prosperity. The book shows how to combine financial criteria such as profitability and risk with non-financial criteria such as the protection of the ecosystem, responsible consumption of energy, and healthcare campaigns. The book's first part presents critical issues in ethical investment, while the second explains in detail the application of goal programming techniques for SRI funds, illustrating their use in actual cases. Part three demonstrates how compromise programming can be applied in the contexts of portfolio selection and risk management. Finally, in its fourth part the book examines the application of other decision-making support methods like the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework, the Reference Point Method, and soft computing techniques for portfolio selection.

Taiwanese foreign direct investment rapidly expanded in the mid-1980s when the domestic wage rate and the value of the Taiwanese currency skyrocketed simultaneously. Losing their competitive edge at home, many Taiwanese firms relocated to lower wage countries; mainly Southeast Asia and China. Taiwanese Firms in Southeast Asia provides a comprehensive review of Taiwan's direct investment in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. It also explores the motivation behind investment in Asia, Europe and the US. In most countries, incidence of foreign direct investment is positively correlated with firm size. However, in Taiwanese firms, the opposite is true. The book examines the reasons for this and assesses the difference in practice between small and large firms conducting foreign direct investment, focusing on the manufacturing sector. The book also includes an original, comprehensive survey and a series of interviews with Taiwanese parent firms and their subsidiaries in Southeast Asia. The authors conclude that networking underscores the core competitiveness of Taiwanese firms and when these firms invest abroad, they attempt to maintain a close connection with domestic networks to retain competitiveness and flexibility. However, they will have difficulty in sustaining this in the long-term because co-ordination of production across national borders requires intensive input of managerial resources which are scarce among Taiwanese firms. In the long-term, they have to localize and integrate themselves into the local networks. The book is a result of joint research efforts by Taiwanese, American and Southeast Asian scholars and will be required reading for students and scholars of economies in Southeast Asia, international business, Asian studies and multinational enterprise.

This market is the largest and most liquid-call type derivative in the world. Philips and Connolly intend to clarify definitions and discuss why the warrant is so important to the institutional investor. The authors consider its versatility and the implications for profit from the tremendous volatility in this market.

Before entering the seemingly lucrative Chinese market, investors should be aware of the darkside of the current business environment. The risk of rampant corruption, economic, social and political problems, and threat to personal safety go along with the potential benefits of a thriving economy, rapid growth and swelling consumer demand. Dixon and Newman describe the Chinese business environment and its major players--the People's Liberation Army, the 'princelings'--and 'guanxi' (connections). In addition, they describe the plight of foreign business people who have recently found themselves in ugly personal situations because of China's lack of internationally accepted business practices and ethics, lack of institutionalized rule of law, and lack of an impartial law enforcement system. They conclude that any prospective business rewards must be discounted by the personal and personnel risks foreign businesses face when dealing with China.

Disasters happen every day. Are your investments prepared?

The investor who knows how to anticipate historically significant or earth-shattering events--who is prepared to act when others are frozen with fear--will always have a substantial advantage. By closely analyzing potential global threats and the opportunities they present, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Investing in the Apocalypse offers investors the key to finding a silver lining in almost any cataclysm. Even if the catastrophic does not occur, the strategies here can pay huge dividends even under more mundane circumstances.

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Investing in the Apocalypse provides readers with valuable information for investment success: the ability to see opportunity where others see peril. Whether a global disaster is natural or man-made, environmental or financial, every fearsome scenario contains the seeds of profit for the investor who stays calm and thinks rather than panics and runs.