For over fifty years, Eli Schwartz has inspired generations of economists through his prolific publications and dedicated in teaching. In 2008, the Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise at Lehigh University invited prominent academics and practitioners-including Nobel Prize recipients, Robert Solow and Harry Markowitz, and former Chairman of the Economic Advisers to Ronald Reagan, Murray Weidenbaum-to contribute pieces that reflect their own approaches to issues that Schwartz has explored over the long span of his career. The twelve original essays cover a range of topics, including tax reform, corporate finance, fiscal policy, banking, economic growth, and globalization, representing a variety of methodologies, including economic theory, econometrics, and case analysis. The collection emphasizes the underlying connections among seemingly disparate facets of economic activity, and underscores the tremendous influence of Schwartz on economic analysis, policy, and leadership today.

This volume is designed to present a conceptual and practical illustration for the contemporary developing role of Islamic Banking and Finance components including Islamic Banking, Non Islamic Banking (Takaful and Financial Markets Tools and Products.) with stronger focus directed to the regulatory aspects, country, regional case studies and International Financial Crisis impacts. Consequently this Volume aimed at a fruitful contribution while defining how public policies, governance, legal framework and field studies' lessons can help decision makers to identify the major factors that may shape the attitude of both Islamic Financial Institutions and customers towards safe and sound services and through defining main determinants for successful, strategic inclusion of the Islamic Financial System into the real sustained development nationally, regionally and internationally.

Is economic growth desirable? Possible? Necessary? The distinguished social scientists represented in this collection give conflicting answers, resulting in a lively debate on the costs and benefits of growth in the developed and developing countries. This volume, first published in 1973, contains proceedings of a Conference on the Limits to Growth, held at the Center for Social Research, Lehigh University, October 1972. This book will be of interest to students of economics.

Is economic growth desirable? Possible? Necessary? The distinguished social scientists represented in this collection give conflicting answers, resulting in a lively debate on the costs and benefits of growth in the developed and developing countries. This volume, first published in 1973, contains proceedings of a Conference on the Limits to Growth, held at the Center for Social Research, Lehigh University, October 1972. This book will be of interest to students of economics.

Contemporary Issues in Financial Services special edition includes studies by the University of Malta, MSc Banking and Finance graduates and the respective lecturers, on financial services within particular countries or regions and studies of particular themes such as credit risk management, fund management and evaluation, forex hedging using derivatives and sovereign fixed income portfolios.

This edited volume will highlight recent research in derivatives modelling and markets in a post-crisis world across a number of dimensions or themes. The book addresses the following main areas: derivatives models and pricing, model application and performance backtesting, new products and market features. Particular themes encompass: - continuous and discrete time modeling, - statistical arbitrage models, - arbitrage-free pricing, risk-neutral implied densities, - equilibrium pricing approaches (including e.g. co-integration), - applications of methods in computational statistics including simulation, - computationally intense techniques for pricing, estimation and backtesting, - complex derivative products, - credit and counterparty risk, - innovative market and product structures.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 has highlighted the resilience of the financial markets and broader economies from the developing world. This outcome owes much to the bitter experience and economic strategies developed and implemented at both a national and international level following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998. The objective of this volume is to investigate and assess the impact and response to the crisis from an emerging markets perspective including asset pricing, contagion, financial intermediation, market structure and regulation. Our hope is that the assembled papers will offer clear insights into the complex financial arrangements that now link emerging and developed financial markets in the current economic environment. The volume spans four dimensions: first, a series of background studies offer explanations of the causes and impacts of the crisis on emerging markets more generally; then, implications are considered. The third and final sections provide insights from regional and country-specific perspectives.

For over fifty years, Eli Schwartz has inspired generations of economists through his prolific publications and dedicated in teaching. In 2008, the Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise at Lehigh University invited prominent academics and practitioners-including Nobel Prize recipients, Robert Solow and Harry Markowitz, and former Chairman of the Economic Advisers to Ronald Reagan, Murray Weidenbaum-to contribute pieces that reflect their own approaches to issues that Schwartz has explored over the long span of his career. The twelve original essays cover a range of topics, including tax reform, corporate finance, fiscal policy, banking, economic growth, and globalization, representing a variety of methodologies, including economic theory, econometrics, and case analysis. The collection emphasizes the underlying connections among seemingly disparate facets of economic activity, and underscores the tremendous influence of Schwartz on economic analysis, policy, and leadership today.

State and local governments are at a financial crossroads. As the federal government attempts to reduce its deficits, state governments will have to provide a greater share of support for mandatory social programs. Local governments face demands for new initiatives in education and for civic improvements. Both have obligations to employee pension plans that are large and still relatively untested. Running counter to these claims on state and local budgets is a voter effort to limit the amounts that governments may tax or spend.This fourth edition of James A. Maxwell's classic and widely acclaimed book will help both layman and lawmaker understand the choices open to their governments. It provides a lucid, nontechnical analysis of state and local finance. It gives concise descriptions of the taxes, grants, debt issues, and user charges that finance state and local government and discusses their relative virtues and drawbacks. It traces the history of state and local finance and presents statistical data on expenditures, federal aid, revenue from taxes and user charges, debt, and pension funds. The new edition, in recognition of changes since the mid-1970s, also includes a separate chapter on financing education and broadened analyses of federal grant programs, employee retirement systems, and nonguaranteed municipal debt.