Automobiles dominate transportation today in most American cities. After World War II, urban planners embraced highway transportation as the solution to urban congestion, while mass transit was shunned as outmoded and appropriate only for older, densely populated cities. Yet the prolonged energy crisis, beginning in 1973, shattered most previously held attitudes about the role of mass transit, and it was now promoted as central to energy efficiency and rational land use. If mass transit is now possible and even desirable in new, auto-oriented cities - Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Tokyo - why did it decline in the first place? In examining the historical conditions that led to the current crisis of urban transportation, the book offers an explanation of past urban and economic policy failures. The Decline of Transit will be essential reading for urban planners, politicians, economists, historians, and all others interested in the state of urban transportation today.

Robert L. Bartley Editor Emeritus, The Wall Street Journal As this collection of essays is published, markets, regulators and society generally are sorting through the wreckage of the collapse in tech stocks at the turn of the millennium. All the more reason for an exhaustive look at our last "bubble," if that is what we choose to call them. We haven't had time to digest the lesson of the tech stocks and the recession that started in March 2001. After a decade, though, we're ready to understand the savings and loan "bubble" that popped in 1989, preceding the recession that started in July 1990. For more than a half-century, we can now see clearly enough, the savings and loans were an accident waiting to happen. The best insurance for financial institutions is diversification, but the savings and loans were concentrated solely in residential financing. What's more, they were in the business of borrowing short and lending long, accepting deposits that could be withdrawn quickly and making 20-year loans. They were further protected by Regulation Q, allowing them to pay a bit more for savings deposits than commercial banks were allowed to. In normal times, they could ride the yield curve, booking profits because long-term interest rates are generally higher than short-term ones. This world was recorded in Jimmy Stewart's 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life.

China's emerging financial markets reflect the usual contrast between the country's measured approach toward policy, regulatory, and market reform, and the dynamic pace of rapid economic growth and development. But they also offer unusual challenges and opportunities. In the past five years, the pace of opening and reform has accelerated sharply. Recapitalization and partial privatization of the largest banks, and the allowance of some joint venture and branch operations for foreign financial institutions, are making rapid headway in developing and expanding financial services and improving access to domestic business and households. This book provides the most extensive look available at the evolving Chinese financial system. It begins with alternative perspectives on the evolution of the financial system and the broad outlines of its prospects and potential contribution to economic growth. Three articles review broad aspects of the financial system. Franklin Allen, Jun ''QJ'' Qian, Meijun Qian, and Mengxin Zhao lead off with overviews of the banking system and performance of the equity market and other institutions.

• This book will be the most up-to-date compilation of different perspectives on entrepreneurship.
• The authors are highly respected in the field, either as scholars or practitioners and have interacted before on this topic either as co-authors on papers or as conference discussants
• The research provides historical information as well as the latest data on entrepreneurship
• The book focuses on "emerging domestic markets" which encompasses minorities, women, and low-income communities

China's emerging financial markets reflect the usual contrast between the country's measured approach toward policy, regulatory, and market reform, and the dynamic pace of rapid economic growth and development. But they also offer unusual challenges and opportunities. In the past five years, the pace of opening and reform has accelerated sharply. Recapitalization and partial privatization of the largest banks, and the allowance of some joint venture and branch operations for foreign financial institutions, are making rapid headway in developing and expanding financial services and improving access to domestic business and households. This book provides the most extensive look available at the evolving Chinese financial system. It begins with alternative perspectives on the evolution of the financial system and the broad outlines of its prospects and potential contribution to economic growth. Three articles review broad aspects of the financial system. Franklin Allen, Jun ''QJ'' Qian, Meijun Qian, and Mengxin Zhao lead off with overviews of the banking system and performance of the equity market and other institutions.

• This book will be the most up-to-date compilation of different perspectives on entrepreneurship.
• The authors are highly respected in the field, either as scholars or practitioners and have interacted before on this topic either as co-authors on papers or as conference discussants
• The research provides historical information as well as the latest data on entrepreneurship
• The book focuses on "emerging domestic markets" which encompasses minorities, women, and low-income communities

Now that globalization is a reality and cross-border is no longer a discretionary activity, companies need reliable tools to manage the risks associated with doing business around the world. This title is a relevant, practical addition to risk management literature. This book will help readers think about their global business differently, manage them effectively, and develop ways to forecast in which areas they might get into trouble. To support the book there will be an internet-based tool that offers up-to-date risk information by country. This title is the right mix of important new research and practical applicability for readers. It details the risks of doing business overseas and is as valuable to someone in Europe or Asia or in the US. Author, Kurtzman is well-known and respected in both academic and business circles.Since a systematic understanding of global risks is in its infancy, this book has the potential to be the definitive work that transforms the subject. It is packed with international companies including Sumitono Bank, Bre-X, Banco Ambrosiano, Parmalat, Royal Ahold, Barings Bank, Daiwa Securities, BCCI, Lloyd Aero Boliviano, Viacao Aerea, ChuoAoyama, Kanebo, Glo

The Savings and Loan Crisis: Lessons from a Regulatory Failure sets the record straight about what actually happened to our banking institutions in the 1980s. As is documented by the highly respected and diverse group of former regulators, scholars and practitioners contributing to this book, the collapse of this industry was caused by a confluence of adverse economic conditions and misguided regulatory decisions. Poorly designed deposit insurance, faulty supervision, and restrictions on investments prevented savings and loans from adapting to a changing financial marketplace. Unable to use financial innovations, savings and loans could not hedge interest rate and credit risks. These factors blocked portfolio diversification and lay at the root of the crisis.
The savings and loan crisis was an accident, but it was an avoidable one. Most of the factors responsible for causing and exacerbating the industry's problems were preventable, as is made clear in this volume.

This book also provides an insider's view of the transformation of the financial services industry in the United States since the 1980s: how the managers and owners make decisions about product offerings and investments; how the regulators monitor performance and enforce the rules; and how Congress and the Administration influence and are influenced by the financial services industry.

Lastly, it focuses attention on the lessons that should have been learned from this difficult period in the history of U.S. banking, and that should help prevent future banking crises everywhere.

Policy makers around the globe will find that Restructuring Regulation and Financial Institutions offers a cogent assessment of the contemporary regulatory environment in the U.S. financial markets, and a blueprint for action in evolving global financial markets. Financial markets are among the most highly-regulated markets in the world. Nevertheless, financial crises still occur, witness the U.S. savings-and-loan fiasco of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Mexican and East Asian Financial implosions of 1994 and 1997. What role does regulation play in stabilizing-or-destabilizing financial markets? Restructuring Regulation and Financial Institutions answers this question with incisive analysis of financial market regulation in the United States. Each paper considers how regulation enhances or impedes the efficiency of a particular financial sector, and is followed by comments by two or three noted experts. The result of this approach is a wealth of useful information that may be applied by policy makers contemplating the restructuring of regulations and financial institutions. The contributors to this volume are distinguished economists, many of whom have careers not just in business, government, or academia, but have held influential positions in all three. Such varied backgrounds enable the contributors to offer remarkable insights based on the best of theory and practice. Never before has understanding the workings of U.S. financial market regulation been so important to the development of world financial markets. The ramifications of financial regulation in the United States extend far beyond the nation's borders. World financial markets are undergoing dramatic change, driven by the rapid development and deployment of new technology that enables information-and money-to travel farther, faster. However, a Byzantine array of regulatory structures in the international arena hinders the development of efficient global financial markets. Policy makers around the world are attempting to address the issues by emulating the financial markets of the United States.

Since financial myths exploded in the 1980s, the perspective of time creates a unique opportunity to update and expand the analysis begun in Glenn Yagos 1991 book, Junk Bonds: How High Yield Securities Restructured Corporate America (Oxford University Press). At the time of its publication, Junk Bonds drew controversial responses from the Federal Reserve and government agencies. In retrospect, the evidence clearly casts favorable light on the role of high yield securities. The research presented here demonstrates how financial innovations enabled capital access for industrial restructuring, capital and labor productivity gains, and improved global competitiveness. Enough time has now passed to allow this dispassionate empirical analysis to shear away the hype and hysteria that surrounded the Wall Street scandals, Washington controversies, and media frenzy of the time.

Beyond Junk Bonds provides a one-stop data, reference and case study presentation of the firms and securities in the contemporary high yield market and the financial innovations that spurred growth in the nineties and will continue to finance the future. The high yield market incubated successive waves of financial technologies that now proliferate beyond junk bonds to all the dimensions and dynamics of global debt and equity capital markets. It charts the recovery of the market in the 1990s, the recent wave of fallen angels, distressed credits and defaults, and suggests how the high yield market will be recreated in the global market of the 21st century. It explicates the linkages between the high yield market, and other credit and equity markets in managing a firms capital structure to execute its business strategy. The weakening of the U. S. economy in 2001 and the huge shock to Wall Street from the terrorist attacks of September 11 witnessed a historic increase in the yield to maturity of high yield bonds. Despite the volatility in the flow of funds to high yield mutual funds and occasionally sharp increases in non-investment grade debt yields, the asset class has been one of the best performing fixed income investments of the past decades. In fact, high yield bonds offer an attractive risk-reward ratio competitive with more traditional asset classes.

Anyone active in corporate finance, financial institutions and capital markets will find this book a must read for interpreting and understanding the recent history both of the high yield marketplace and its interaction with private equity, public equity, and fixed income markets. This new perspective recalling the ten years after the explosion of financial myths in the 1980's offers a unique opportunity to update and continue the arguments that were presented in Glen Yago's 1991 book, Junk Bonds: How High Yield Securities Restructured Corporate America. Beyond Junk Bonds provides a comprehensive presentation of the firms and securities represented in the high yield market. In addition, there are examples of the firms and institutions who are benefitting from the "new cycle", both in the US and abroad.

Junk bonds burst into the nation's headlines as the fastest growing and most controversial financial instruments of the 1980s. Branded with an unflattering nickname, these high yield securities were tarnished in the public eye by waves of negative publicity. Critics cast the financiers and entrepreneurs who pioneered their use as symbols of a decade of greed and financial excess. By the end of the 1980s, the heyday of junk bonds had seemingly come to a close with the conviction of junk bond pioneer Michael Milken and the bankruptcy of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the brokerage that dominated the high yield market. But the controversy surrounding junk bonds continues.
Now, in Junk Bonds, business professor Glenn Yago turns the tables on conventional wisdom about this new financial technology. He offers the first systematic examination of the facts about high yield securities. His analysis provides hard evidence that demystifies junk bonds and explodes many of the popular myths that surround them.
Junk Bonds sheds light on the role of high yield financing in what Yago calls the democratization of capital. Before the advent of junk bonds, only companies with an "investment grade" rating--five percent of the 23,000 American companies with sales over $35 million--had access to long term capital. In effect, the author argues, 95 percent of American companies were denied the means to finance growth and business development. Yago shows how junk bonds changed all that, breathing life into thousands of American companies that had been shunned by the capital markets. His research demonstrates that these "junk" companies outperformed many Fortune 500 firms in job creation, product development, sales, and business innovation.
The real contribution of junk bonds, according to Yago, was to improve the productivity and competitiveness of American business by restructuring companies in the wake of the corporate conglomerations of the 1960s and 1970s. His findings show that divestitures by companies financed with high yield bonds were not necessarily destructive. Many sold-off units flourished as independent enterprises at a time when numerous "investment grade" companies stagnated or closed plants or fired workers. This restructuring of corporate America has enabled businesses to compete in a changing international environment, benefiting managers, workers, stockholders, and investors alike.
Junk Bonds provides readers with a scholarly analysis that shears away the hype and hysteria that often accompany rapid change. And at a time when Wall Street is under greater scrutiny than at any time since the Depression, this provocative study provides a timely and thoughtful contribution to the debate surrounding junk bonds.