This book provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of cultural finance. It summarizes research results of cultural differences in financial decision making and financial markets. Many of the results have been published in leading academic journals over the last ten years but some are presented here for the first time. The book is based on an international survey on risk and time preferences — the INTRA study, conducted in 53 countries worldwide. Applications to financial markets include the equity premium puzzle, the value premium, dividend payout policies and asset allocations.

This book provides insights into the true nature of financial and economic data, and is a practical guide on how to analyze a variety of data sources. The focus of the book is on finance and economics, but it also illustrates the use of quantitative analysis and data science in many different areas. Lastly, the book includes practical information on how to store and process data and provides a framework for data driven reasoning about the world.The book begins with entertaining tales from Graham Giller's career in finance, starting with speculating in UK government bonds at the Oxford Post Office, accidentally creating a global instant messaging system that went 'viral' before anybody knew what that meant, on being the person who forgot to hit 'enter' to run a hundred-million dollar statistical arbitrage system, what he decoded from his brief time spent with Jim Simons, and giving Michael Bloomberg a tutorial on Granger Causality.The majority of the content is a narrative of analytic work done on financial, economics, and alternative data, structured around both Dr Giller's professional career and some of the things that just interested him. The goal is to stimulate interest in predictive methods, to give accurate characterizations of the true properties of financial, economic and alternative data, and to share what Richard Feynman described as 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.'

Successful startups and small businesses can play a significant role in economic growth and job creation. They also contribute to economic dynamism by spurring innovation and injecting competition. Startups are known to introduce new products and services that can create new value in the economy. It is notable that most startups exit within their first ten years, and most surviving young businesses do not grow but remain small. Startups and small businesses face several obstacles to their development. Accessing capital is a crucial constraint on their growth. Most startups and small businesses have difficulties getting the funds they need because of their lack of a performance track record and lack of collateral, making it difficult for lenders or investors to assess their risk. Besides, they are in the early stages of development and face a very high possibility of failure, which significantly raises financing and investment risk.Investment in Startups and Small Business Financing provides 12 thematic and case studies on new methods for bringing private investment (loans or equity) to startups and easing small businesses' access to finance (debt and capital). The contributors are senior-level policy experts and researchers from governments, think tanks, academia, and international organizations. The chapters are authored in a policy-oriented way to be understandable for the readers with a different background. This book is a precious source for the governments for adopting the right policies to develop small businesses and startups and valuable for the researchers in economics, business, and finance.

This book directly focuses on finding optimal trading strategies in the real world and supports that with a well-defined theoretical foundation that allows trading strategy problems to be solved. Critically, it also delivers a menu of actual solutions that can be applied by traders with various risk profiles and objectives in markets that exhibit substantial tail risk. It shows how the Markowitz approach leads to excessive risk taking, and trader underperformance, in the real world. It summarizes the key features of Utility Theory, the deficiencies of the Sharpe Ratio as a statistic, and develops an optimal decision theory with fully developed examples for both 'Normal' and leptokurtotic distributions.

This book is a collection of applications of analytic techniques to a number of popular sports including baseball, basketball, hockey, Jai Alai, NFL football and horseracing. We focus on both the statistics of the sporting events and betting strategies on the events. The subject is fascinating as there are many twists and subtle complicated decisions.Sports analytics applies mathematical and statistical methods to important questions in the structure and performance of sporting activities using the same basic methods and approaches as data analysts in other disciplines.Sports games and events are a fruitful area for study and to evaluate betting strategies as there is extensive data and mean reversion. With prices changing continuously, risk arbitrage bets can be made. Moreover, little errors, like a penalty to a player or an error in a call by a referee, can change the score of a game and corresponding betting prices. The collection and analysis of in-game data can inform players, coaches and staff on effective decision making during sporting events.Novel features of the book include: an analysis of who were the greatest baseball batters; analyses of the players most important to team success (and they are not necessarily the best players) in basketball, NFL football and hockey; a tutorial on risk arbitrage and its applications to NFL football and NBA basketball; a discussion of many ad hoc decision rules by coaches and players and what was really optimal; in the racing section we discuss breeding, the analysis of various bets like the Rainbow and ordinary Pick 6, a discussion and betting on the most important races and a visit to the Breeders' Cup with Ed Thorp to demonstrate the place and show system in action.

A definitive cultural history of high finance from one of the industry's most astute analysts Written by internationally respected financial expert Satyajit Das, Extreme Money shows how real engineering was replaced by financial engineering in the twentieth century, enabling vast fortunes to be made not from goods produced or services performed, but from supplying and trading money. Extreme Money focuses on this eviscerated reality—the monetary shadow of real things—and what it means today. The high levels of economic growth and the wealth that inevitably follows, driven by cheap debt, financial engineering, and speculation, were never sustainable, and the last few years have borne this out. The book shows how policy makers and regulators unknowingly underwrote the risks, substantially reducing their ability to control economic outcomes. Extreme money concentrated economic power, wealth, and risk in the hands of a small community of gifted, dynamic financiers largely outside the regulatory purview and the democratic process, and there's no going back. Explains the extreme money games (via private equity, securitization, derivatives, hedge funds, and other means) invented by the elite financiers of last century Raises deeper questions about the nature of the economic structure and assumptions about ongoing financially engineered prosperity that readers, politicians, and financial figures need to be asking The book is timed to coincide with the next phase of the financial crisis, as prospects of recovery diminish and the global economy becomes mired in a Western version of Japan's "Lost Decade" Ambitious in scope and coverage, the book is the indispensible, in-depth guide to the age of modern money. An age defined by extremes of financial behavior.

Everything from home mortgages to climate change has become financialized, as vast fortunes are generated by individuals who build nothing of lasting value. Das shows how "extreme money" has become ever more unreal; how "voodoo banking" continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of "Masters of the Universe" has come to domiinate the world.