This innovative book analyses the role played by real estate markets in global financial stability and examines the fragile link between the two.Through what transmission channels do housing market cycles influence broader economic systems? How has the Global Financial Crisis shifted our view and understanding of these linkages? This detailed book answers these questions in an international comparative perspective. Specific topics covered include macroeconomic transmission channels of the housing cycle, the role of housing in the finance system, construction financing as a cycle amplifier, and various related public policy issues such as the policy remedies needed to deal with housing and mortgage-driven crises. Eminent scholars in the field provide insightful and original contributions, which will appeal to academics in the areas of macroeconomics, policy analysis and financial regulation. Practitioners involved in real estate and the mortgage market will also find it to be of interest. Contributors: C.-O. Chang, M.-C. Chen, M. Cho, G. Dell'Ariccia, H.-J. Dubel, M. Hwang, M. Iacoviello, D. Igan, K. Kim, K.-H. Kim, Y.I. Kim, C.-M. Lee, Y.-M. Lee, J.-y. Son, I. Song, S.H. Suh, M.J. Tcha, S. Wachter, T.T. Yang, J.Y. Zhang

This book is about retirement income security. This income security is provided by national public pensions, corporate pensions, and individual and reverse mortgages. However, these systems vary greatly from country to country and, in many countries, do not provide sufficient coverage. Ensuring income security in old age is an important issue that must be resolved in the rapidly aging environment of the world. From the perspective of financial consumers, this book cross-sectionally surveys public pensions, corporate pensions, individual pensions and reverse mortgages and compares them among many important nations. This gives many implications from the perspective of designing an overall income security for each individual. In addition, it presents many of the issues needed for these sustainable and comprehensive income security.

Finding low-rank solutions of semidefinite programs is important in many applications. For example, semidefinite programs that arise as relaxations of polynomial optimization problems are exact relaxations when the semidefinite program has a rank-1 solution. Unfortunately, computing a minimum-rank solution of a semidefinite program is an NP-hard problem. This monograph reviews the theory of low-rank semidefinite programming, presenting theorems that guarantee the existence of a low-rank solution, heuristics for computing low-rank solutions, and algorithms for finding low-rank approximate solutions. It then presents applications of the theory to trust-region problems and signal processing.