Over the last decade, socially responsible investments (SRIs) have become paramount to both professionals and academics. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-8, practitioners have become much more involved in new financial models that integrate returns and positive social and environmental impacts. The authors argue that previous irresponsible financial models are anachronistic, and propose a new relationship between stakeholder and shareholder. Starting from the mainstreaming of SRI, this book recovers the social function of banks and the innovative role of crowdfunding and venture capital models. The book offers a unified perspective for firm and funder, making it a timely and invaluable read for scholars and practitioners interested in sustainable development and social impact finance.

Fixed income volatility and equity volatility evolve heterogeneously over time, co-moving disproportionately during periods of global imbalances and each reacting to events of different nature. While the methodology for options-based "model-free" pricing of equity volatility has been known for some time, little is known about analogous methodologies for pricing various fixed income volatilities. This book fills this gap and provides a unified evaluation framework of fixed income volatility while dealing with disparate markets such as interest-rate swaps, government bonds, time-deposits and credit. It develops model-free, forward looking indexes of fixed-income volatility that match different quoting conventions across various markets, and uncovers subtle yet important pitfalls arising from naive superimpositions of the standard equity volatility methodology when pricing various fixed income volatilities.

Stochastic Volatility in Financial Markets presents advanced topics in financial econometrics and theoretical finance, and is divided into three main parts. The first part aims at documenting an empirical regularity of financial price changes: the occurrence of sudden and persistent changes of financial markets volatility. This phenomenon, technically termed stochastic volatility', or conditional heteroskedasticity', has been well known for at least 20 years; in this part, further, useful theoretical properties of conditionally heteroskedastic models are uncovered. The second part goes beyond the statistical aspects of stochastic volatility models: it constructs and uses new fully articulated, theoretically-sounded financial asset pricing models that allow for the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. The third part shows how the inclusion of the statistical aspects of stochastic volatility in a rigorous economic scheme can be faced from an empirical standpoint.

Over the last decade, socially responsible investments (SRIs) have become paramount to both professionals and academics. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-8, practitioners have become much more involved in new financial models that integrate returns and positive social and environmental impacts. The authors argue that previous irresponsible financial models are anachronistic, and propose a new relationship between stakeholder and shareholder. Starting from the mainstreaming of SRI, this book recovers the social function of banks and the innovative role of crowdfunding and venture capital models. The book offers a unified perspective for firm and funder, making it a timely and invaluable read for scholars and practitioners interested in sustainable development and social impact finance.

Stochastic Volatility in Financial Markets presents advanced topics in financial econometrics and theoretical finance, and is divided into three main parts. The first part aims at documenting an empirical regularity of financial price changes: the occurrence of sudden and persistent changes of financial markets volatility. This phenomenon, technically termed stochastic volatility', or conditional heteroskedasticity', has been well known for at least 20 years; in this part, further, useful theoretical properties of conditionally heteroskedastic models are uncovered. The second part goes beyond the statistical aspects of stochastic volatility models: it constructs and uses new fully articulated, theoretically-sounded financial asset pricing models that allow for the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. The third part shows how the inclusion of the statistical aspects of stochastic volatility in a rigorous economic scheme can be faced from an empirical standpoint.

Fixed income volatility and equity volatility evolve heterogeneously over time, co-moving disproportionately during periods of global imbalances and each reacting to events of different nature. While the methodology for options-based "model-free" pricing of equity volatility has been known for some time, little is known about analogous methodologies for pricing various fixed income volatilities. This book fills this gap and provides a unified evaluation framework of fixed income volatility while dealing with disparate markets such as interest-rate swaps, government bonds, time-deposits and credit. It develops model-free, forward looking indexes of fixed-income volatility that match different quoting conventions across various markets, and uncovers subtle yet important pitfalls arising from naive superimpositions of the standard equity volatility methodology when pricing various fixed income volatilities.

Learn to create fully functional web applications with authentication, content management systems, payment processing, RESTful APIs, and more Key Features Implement advanced functionalities, such as full-text search engines, user activity streams, payment gateways, and recommendation engines Integrate JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, and Memcached into your applications Add real-time features with Django Channels and WebSockets Book DescriptionDjango 4 By Example is the 4th edition of the best-selling franchise that helps you build web apps. This book will walk you through the creation of real-world applications, solving common problems, and implementing best practices using a step-by-step approach. You'll cover a wide range of web app development topics as you build four different apps: A blog application: Create data models, views, and URLs and implement an admin site for your blog. Create sitemaps and RSS feeds and implement a full-text search engine with PostgreSQL. A social website: Implement authentication with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Create user profiles, image thumbnails, a bookmarklet, and an activity stream. Implement a user follower system and add infinite scroll pagination to your website. An e-commerce application: Build a product catalog, a shopping cart, and asynchronous tasks with Celery and RabbitMQ. Process payments with Stripe and manage payment notifications via webhooks. Build a product recommendation engine with Redis. Create PDF invoices and export orders to CSV. An e-learning platform: Create a content management system to manage polymorphic content. Cache content with Memcached and Redis. Build and consume a RESTful API. Implement a real-time chat using WebSockets with ASGI. Create a production environment using NGINX, uWSGI and Daphne with Docker Compose. This is a practical book that will have you creating web apps quickly. What you will learn Learn Django essentials, including models, ORM, views, templates, URLs, forms, authentication, signals and middleware Implement different modules of the Django framework to solve specific problems Integrate third-party Django applications into your project Build asynchronous (ASGI) applications with Django Set up a production environment for your projects Easily create complex web applications to solve real use cases Who this book is forThis book is for readers with basic Python knowledge and programmers transitioning from other web frameworks who wish to learn Django by doing. If you already use Django or have in the past, and want to learn best practices and integrate other technologies to scale your applications, then this book is for you too. This book will help you master the most relevant areas of the framework by building practical projects from scratch. Some previous knowledge of HTML and JavaScript is assumed.

Learn Django 3 with four end-to-end web projects Key Features Learn Django 3 by building real-world web applications from scratch in Python, using coding best practices Integrate other technologies into your application with clear, step-by-step explanations and comprehensive example code Implement advanced functionalities like a full-text search engine, a user activity stream, or a recommendation engine Add real-time features with Django Channels and WebSockets Book DescriptionIf you want to learn the entire process of developing professional web applications with Python and Django, then this book is for you. In the process of building four professional Django projects, you will learn about Django 3 features, how to solve common web development problems, how to implement best practices, and how to successfully deploy your applications. In this book, you will build a blog application, a social image bookmarking website, an online shop, and an e-learning platform. Step-by-step guidance will teach you how to integrate popular technologies, enhance your applications with AJAX, create RESTful APIs, and set up a production environment for your Django projects. By the end of this book, you will have mastered Django 3 by building advanced web applications. What you will learn Build real-world web applications Learn Django essentials, including models, views, ORM, templates, URLs, forms, and authentication Implement advanced features such as custom model fields, custom template tags, cache, middleware, localization, and more Create complex functionalities, such as AJAX interactions, social authentication, a full-text search engine, a payment system, a CMS, a RESTful API, and more Integrate other technologies, including Redis, Celery, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, and Channels, into your projects Deploy Django projects in production using NGINX, uWSGI, and Daphne Who this book is forThis book is intended for developers with Python knowledge who wish to learn Django in a pragmatic way. Perhaps you are completely new to Django, or you already know a little but you want to get the most out of it. This book will help you to master the most relevant areas of the framework by building practical projects from scratch. You need to have familiarity with programming concepts in order to read this book. Some previous knowledge of HTML and JavaScript is assumed.

Publisher's Note: This edition from 2018 is outdated and is based on Django 2. A new and updated edition of this book, based on Django 3 and including other related updates, is now available. Learn Django 2 with four end-to-end projects Key Features Learn Django 2 by building real-world web applications from scratch Develop powerful web applications quickly using the best coding practices Integrate other technologies into your application with clear, step-by-step explanations and comprehensive example code Book DescriptionIf you want to learn the entire process of developing professional web applications with Django 2, then this book is for you. You will walk through the creation of four professional Django 2 projects, teaching you how to solve common problems and implement best practices. You will learn how to build a blog application, a social image bookmarking website, an online shop and an e-learning platform. The book will teach you how to enhance your applications with AJAX, create RESTful APIs and set up a production environment for your Django 2 projects. The book walks you through the creation of real-world applications, solving common problems, and implementing best practices. By the end of this book, you will have a deep understanding of Django 2 and how to build advanced web applications. What you will learn Build practical real-world web applications with Django 2 Use Django 2 with other technologies such as Redis and Celery Develop pluggable Django 2 applications Create advanced features, optimize your code, and use the cache framework Add internationalization to your Django 2 projects Enhance the user experience using JavaScript and AJAX Add social features to your projects Build RESTful APIs for your applications Who this book is forIf you are a web developer who wants to see how to build professional sites with Django 2, this book is for. You will need a basic knowledge of Python, HTML, and JavaScript, but you don't need to have worked with Django before.