Strategic Financial Planning Over the Lifecycle


Book Description

This is a final-year college level textbook on personal finance, jointly written by business school and mathematics professors. It is aimed at a wide audience of people who are interested in wealth management from a more rigorous perspective. It may be used in both personal applications and professional classrooms.




Tax Smoothing in a Financially Repressed Economy


Book Description

India has a long history of running fiscal deficits. Two broad considerations motivate a government to run a deficit: tax smoothing and tax tilting. This paper tests a version of Barro’s tax-smoothing model, using Indian data for the period 1951-52 to 1996-97. The empirical results indicate that the central government of India has tax-smoothed, while the regional governments of India have not. The paper also finds evidence of tax tilting, reflected in financial repression, which has led to the accumulation of excessive public liabilities.




Spend Now, Pay Later? Tax Smoothing and Fiscal Sustainability in South Asia


Book Description

This paper tests a version of Barro’s tax-smoothing model, which assumes intertemporal optimization by a government seeking to minimize the distortionary costs of taxation, using Pakistan and Sri Lankan data for 1956-95 and 1964-97, respectively. The empirical results indicate that Pakistan’s fiscal behavior is consistent with tax smoothing, but not Sri Lanka’s. Moreover, fiscal behavior in both countries was dominated by a stagnation of revenues, large tax-tilting-induced deficits, and the consequent accumulation of excessive public liabilities. Analysis of the time-series characteristics of tax-tilting behavior indicates that for both countries the stock of public liabilities is unsustainable under unchanged fiscal policies.




Monetary Regimes in Transition


Book Description

This important contribution to comparative economic history examines different countries' experiences with different monetary regimes. The contributors lay particular emphasis on how the regimes fared when placed under stress such as wars and or other changes in the economic environment. Covering the experience of ten countries over the period 1700SH1990, the book employs the latest techniques of economic analysis in order to understand why particular monetary regimes and policies succeeded or failed.




Optimum Currency Areas


Book Description

Robert Mundell's pioneering theory of optimum currency areas is revisited, with experts from the IMF, the BIS, the European Investment Bank, academia, European think tanks, and the Bank of Israel looking at its current practical applications, especially in the context of the forthcoming European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Robert Mundell himself offers an update to help in assessing the implications and consequences of EMU.




New Perspectives of Profit Smoothing


Book Description

In a first approximation, profit may seem like a simple and intuitive concept, but the definition is not limited to a single conceptual category. Analysis of the definition and role of profit must be implemented with a study at the corporate level. This book discusses the phenomenon of profit smoothing, implemented by management, which aims to maintain a constant flow of profit over time. On an operational level, the phenomenon of profit smoothing analyses and determines the correlation existing between a shock to a variable at the corporate level and the relationship between this shock and profit. This book discusses the main reasons, at the strategic level, of the phenomenon of profit smoothing and summarizes this into three groups. Firstly, the functionality of this phenomenon for corporate management is to transmit to the external environment, and especially to external investors, a business reality devoid of crisis and imbalances. Secondly, this initial motivation engages basically the second. In fact, levelling the trend of profit from year to year, top management can reduce the risk perceived from the outsiders and as from the company’s insiders. Thirdly, this justification is related to the stability of the flow of dividends. Profit smoothing places great emphasis on the phenomenon of dividends. It should be note how in fact the profit smoothing is used to keep the expectations of shareholders profit from one period to another. This book is focused on the profit smoothing and, in particular, how this phenomenon is established in developing-economies like the Chinese one, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of corporate finance.




Seigniorage


Book Description

This book analyzes the revenues from the creation of currency by a central government. Adopting an institutional perspective, it develops a general theory of seigniorage by identifying three monetary regimes in economic history and the history of economic thought: a commodity currency, a fiat currency and a credit currency regime. As such it provides a modern analytical framework to analyze the nature of revenues from the creation of currency and their optimal height, whether currency is issued by means of minting coins, by printing and spending paper notes, by crediting private entities, or combinations thereof. The results of this analysis stretch beyond the immediate topic. The book establishes a relationship between the theory of seigniorage and government debt, the theory of the interest rate, the optimal rate of inflation, or the effectiveness and inflationary limits of outright monetary transactions.




Smoothing Income Numbers


Book Description




Analytical Issues in Trade, Development and Finance


Book Description

The book’s 30 chapters are divided into three sections – international trade, economic development, macroeconomics and finance – and focus on the frontier issues in each. Section I addresses analytical issues relating to trade-environment linkage, capital accumulation for pollution abatement, possibility of technology diffusion by multinational corporations, nature of innovation inducing tariff protection, effects of import restriction and child labour, the links between exchange rate, direction of trade and financial crisis—the implications for India and global economic crisis, financial institutions and global capital flows and balance of payments imbalances. Section II consists of discussions on the causes of widespread poverty persisting in South Asia, development dividend associated with peace in South Asia, issues of well-being and human development, implications for endogenous growth through human capital accumulation on environmental quality and taxation, the rationale for a labour supply schedule for the poor, switching as an investment strategy, the role of government and strategic interaction in the presence of information asymmetry, government’s role in controlling food inflation, inter-state variations in levels and growth of industry in India, structural breaks in India’s service sector development, and the phenomenon of wasted votes in India’s parliamentary elections. Section III deals with the effectiveness of monetary policy in tackling economic crisis, the effective demand model of corporate leverages and recession, the empirical link between stock market development and economic growth in cross-country experience in Asia, an empirical verification of the Mckinnon-Shaw hypothesis for financial development in India, the dynamics of the behaviour of the Indian stock market, efficiency of non-life insurance companies, econometric study of the causal linkage between FDI and current account balance in India and the implications of contagious crises for the Indian economy.




New Trends in Macroeconomics


Book Description

This text provides a new approach to the subject, including a comprehensive survey of novel theoretical approaches, methods, and models used in macroeconomics and macroeconometrics. The book gives extensive insight into economic policy, incorporates a strong international perspective, and offers a broad historical perspective.