Financial Innovations and Market Volatility


Book Description

In this book, Nobel Laureate Merton Miller presents a sustained attack on the popular view that modern financial innovations have created excessive market volatility to the detriment of individual savers and business investors, and that regulation is essential in such forms as higher margin requirements, taxes on trading, and perhaps even closing down the future market.




Smart Money


Book Description

Seven years after the financial crisis of 2008, financiers remain villains in the public mind. Most Americans believe that their irresponsible actions and complex financial products wrecked the economy and destroyed people's savings, and that bankers never adequately paid for their crimes. But as Economist journalist Andrew Palmer argues in Smart Money, this much maligned industry is not only capable of doing great good for society, but offers the most powerful means we have for solving some of our most intractable social problems. From Babylon to the present, the history of finance has always been one of powerful innovation. Now a new generation of financial entrepreneurs is working to revive this tradition of useful innovation, and Palmer shows why we need their ideas today more than ever. Traveling to the centers of finance across the world, Palmer introduces us to peer-to-peer lenders who are financing entrepreneurs the big banks won't bet on, creating opportunities where none existed. He explores the world of social-impact bonds, which fund programs for the impoverished and homeless, simultaneously easing the burden on national governments and producing better results. And he explores the idea of human-capital contracts, whereby investors fund the educations of cash-strapped young people in return for a percentage of their future earnings. In this far-ranging tour of the extraordinarily creative financial ideas of today and of the future, Smart Money offers an inspiring look at the new era of financial innovation that promises to benefit us all.




Explaining Monetary and Financial Innovation


Book Description

This book discusses theories of monetary and financial innovation and applies them to key monetary and financial innovations in history – starting with the use of silver bars in Mesopotamia and ending with the emergence of the Eurodollar market in London. The key monetary innovations are coinage (Asia minor, China, India), the payment of interest on loans, the bill of exchange and deposit banking (Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London). The main financial innovation is the emergence of bond markets (also starting in Venice). Episodes of innovation are contrasted with relatively stagnant environments (the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire). The comparisons suggest that small, open and competing jurisdictions have been more innovative than large empires – as has been suggested by David Hume in 1742.




Individual Behaviors and Technologies for Financial Innovations


Book Description

This book offers comprehensive examination of research on the relevance of individual behavior and technology to financial innovations. The chapters cover current topics in finance including integrated reporting, people finance, crowdfunding, and corporate networks. It provides readers with an organized starting point to explore individual behaviors and new technologies used in financial innovations. The explicit and growing speed of the spread of new technologies has hastened the emergence of innovation in the field of finance. Topics like the Internet of Things, semantic computing and big data finance are motivating the construction of financial tools that translate into new financial mechanisms. This book strives help readers better understand the dynamic of the changes in financial systems and the proliferation of financial products. Individual Behaviors and Technologies for Financial Innovations is organized in 16 chapters, organized in three parts. Part I has eight chapters that review the research on gender differences in attitudes about risk and propensity to purchase automobile insurance, financial literacy models for college students, wellness and attitude of university students in the use of credit cards, impact of programs income distribution and propensity to remain in employment, financial literacy and propensity to resort to informal financing channels, risk behavior in the use of credit cards by students. Part II reviews the research on financing for startups and SMEs, exploring funding through crowdfunding platform, operating credit unions, and using networks of friends to finance small businesses outside the domestic market. The four chapters of Part III describe contexts of financial innovation in listed companies, including society's demands on their behavior - we discuss motivations for companies to participate in corporate sustainability indexes, corporate performance through their profile of socially responsible investments, influence of networks of social relations in the formation of boards, and management of companies, and also the precariousness of financial decisions in large companies, as well as the role of the internet in corporate communication with the market.




Financial Innovations and the Welfare of Nations


Book Description

The central question addressed in Financial Innovations and the Welfare of Nations is how the transfer of financial innovations from developed to developing economies can nurture the dynamics of emerging capital markets. National capital markets can be positioned along a continuum ranging from embryonic to mature and emerged markets according to a decreasing "national cost of capital" criterion. In the introductory chapter Laurent Jacque argues that newly emerging countries are handicapped by a high cost of capital due to "incomplete" and inefficient financial markets. As capital markets graduate to higher level of "emergedness", their national firms avail themselves of a lower cost of capital that makes them more competitive in the global economy and spurs economic growth. Skillful transfer of financial innovations to emerging markets often encourages the deregulation of the country's financial services sector. This results into new conduits for a more efficient capital allocation process such as commercial paper, securitized consumer finance and other disintermediated modes of financing which out-compete traditional financial intermediaries (mostly commercial banks), reduce households' cost of living and conjointly fuel the dynamics of emerging markets. Our response to the central question of how the transfer of financial innovations can enhance the Wealth of Nations is to show that it reduces the cost of capital while not unduly increasing systemic risk. Part I examines the relationship between financial innovations and systemic risk of the international financial system.




Blockchain Economics and Financial Market Innovation


Book Description

This book discusses various aspects of blockchains in economic systems and investment strategies in crypto markets. It first addresses the topic from a conceptual and theoretical point of view, and then analyzes it from an assessment and investment angle. Further, it examines the opportunities and limitations of the taxation of crypto currency, as well as the political implications, such as regulation of speculation with crypto currencies. The book is intended for academicians and students in the fields of economics and finance.




Sustainable Financial Innovation


Book Description

Innovations and consequently future-fitness must form new models and address existing hurdles and new forms of collaborations. They must enable faster innovation cycles and "intelligence mining" by combining open and closed source systems, organic communities, open space techniques and cross-fertilization. Innovations must apply to and integrate incubation and acceleration networks. This book explores new concepts for future-fitness with five capitals: financial, ecological, social/cultural, human/personal, and manufactured/technological. It offers a new integral framework bringing researchers and business leaders together in one volume.




Monetary Policy and Financial Innovations in Five IndustrialCountries


Book Description

The objective of this present volume is to analyse the response to the developments and the consequences for the conduct of monetary policy in five industrial countries. Also considered is the stability of hitherto established relationships between economic variables on which the reliability of monetary policy measures depends. The volume further covers some of the international aspects involved and the important implications of the emerging dominant and persistent flows of long-term capital across the exchanges.




Financial Innovation and Resilience


Book Description

As Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy, says in his Foreword, all economic policy makers today need to re-examine our history to help them confront the challenges of today. This edited volume focuses specifically on the theme of financial innovation and how financial resiliency was achieved in Naples. To highlight both the achievements of the public banks of Naples and their lessons for financial resiliency, the book focuses on financial crises and how they were overcome in Naples in contrast to other European financial systems. The first section focuses on the development of the public banks unique to Naples. The second section compares those with other banking systems and how they responded to the same shock in 1622, caused by the full mobilization of European belligerents to finance their efforts in the Thirty Years War. The next section compares lessons learned in the rest of Europe over the next century and a half. The final section comes back to original start of the narrative arc to suggest ways that today’s policymakers and thinkers could use the historical experience of the public banks of Naples to deal better with the ongoing problems stemming from the financial crisis of 2007-08.




Financial Innovation (Collection)


Book Description

Sustainable, responsible financial innovation: lessons from the crisis, and new paths to global prosperity After the global financial crisis, responsible financial innovation is more crucial than ever. However, financial innovation will only succeed if it reflects the true lessons of the past decade. In this collection, three leading global finance researchers share those lessons, offering crucial insights for market participants, policymakers, and other stakeholders. Drawing on their pioneering work, they illuminate new opportunities for sustainable innovation in finance that can help restore housing markets and the overall global economy, while avoiding the failures of predecessors. In Financing the Future, Franklin Allen and Glenn Yago carefully discuss the current role of financial innovation in capitalizing businesses, industries, breakthrough technologies, housing solutions, medical treatments, and environmental projects. Allen and Yago explain how sophisticated capital structures can enable companies and individuals to raise funding in larger amounts for longer terms at lower cost, accomplishing tasks that would otherwise be impossible -- and offer a full chapter of essential lessons for using financial innovation to add value, manage risk, and improve the stability of the global economy. Next, in Fixing the Housing Market, Allen, Yago, and James R. Barth explain how responsible financial innovation can "reboot" damaged housing markets, improve their efficiency, and make housing more accessible to millions. The authors walk through the history of housing finance, evaluate housing finance systems in mature economies during and after the crisis, highlight benefits and risks associated with each leading mortgage funding structure and product, and assess current housing finance structures in BRIC economies. Building on these comparisons, they show how to create a more stable and sustainable financing system for housing: one that provides better shelter for more people, helps the industry recover, and creates thousands of new jobs. From world-renowned leaders and experts Franklin Allen, Glenn Yago, and James R. Barth