Download or read book The Oxford Companion to the Economics of South Africa written by Haroon Bhorat and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1994 South Africa saw the end of apartheid. The new era of political freedom was seen as the foundation for economic prosperity and inclusion. The last two decades have seen mixed results. Economic growth has been volatile. While inequalities in public services have been reduced, income inequality has increased, and poverty has remained stagnant. As the twentieth anniversary of the transition to democracy approaches in 2014, the economic policy debates in South Africa are in full flow. They combine a stocktake of the various programs of the last two decades with a forward looking discussion of strategy in the face of an ever open but volatile global economy. Underlying the discourse are basic and often unresolved differences on an appropriate strategy for an economy like South Africa, with a strong natural resource base but with deeply entrenched inherited inequalities, especially across race. This volume contributes to the policy and analytical debate by pulling together perspectives on a range of issues: micro, macro, sectoral, country wide and global, from leading economists working on South Africa. Other than the requirement that it be analytical and not polemical, the contributors were given freedom to put forward their particular perspective on their topic. The economists invited are from within South Africa and from outside; from academia and the policy world; from international and national level economic policy agencies. The contributors include recognized world leaders in South African economic analysis, as well as the very best of the younger crop of economists who are working on the study of South Africa, the next generation of leaders in thought and policy.

Download or read book Issues in General Economic Research and Application 2013 Edition written by and published by ScholarlyEditions. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 1193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues in General Economic Research and Application: 2013 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ book that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Theoretical Economics. The editors have built Issues in General Economic Research and Application: 2013 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Theoretical Economics in this book to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Issues in General Economic Research and Application: 2013 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.

Download or read book Term Structure Models written by Damir Filipovic and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing interest rates constitute one of the major risk sources for banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. Modeling the term-structure movements of interest rates is a challenging task. This volume gives an introduction to the mathematics of term-structure models in continuous time. It includes practical aspects for fixed-income markets such as day-count conventions, duration of coupon-paying bonds and yield curve construction; arbitrage theory; short-rate models; the Heath-Jarrow-Morton methodology; consistent term-structure parametrizations; affine diffusion processes and option pricing with Fourier transform; LIBOR market models; and credit risk. The focus is on a mathematically straightforward but rigorous development of the theory. Students, researchers and practitioners will find this volume very useful. Each chapter ends with a set of exercises, that provides source for homework and exam questions. Readers are expected to be familiar with elementary Itô calculus, basic probability theory, and real and complex analysis.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards written by and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Macroeconomic Approach to the Term Premium written by Emanuel Kopp and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, term premia have been very low and sometimes even negative. Now, with the United States economy growing above potential, inflationary pressures are on the rise. Term premia are very sensitive to the expected future path of growth, inflation, and monetary policy, and an inflation surprise could require monetary policy to tighten faster than anticipated, inducing to a sudden decompression of term and other risk premia, thus tightening financial conditions. This paper proposes a semi-structural dynamic term structure model augmented with macroeconomic factors to include cyclical dynamics with a focus on medium- to long-run forecasts. Our results clearly show that a macroeconomic approach is warranted: While term premium estimates are in line with those from other studies, we provide (i) plausible, stable estimates of expected long-term interest rates and (ii) forecasts of short- and long-term interest rates as well as cyclical macroeconomic variables that are stunningly close to those generated from large-scale macroeconomic models.

Download or read book Optimization Based Models for Measuring and Hedging Risk in Fixed Income Markets written by Johan Hagenbjörk and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global fixed income market is an enormous financial market whose value by far exceeds that of the public stock markets. The interbank market consists of interest rate derivatives, whose primary purpose is to manage interest rate risk. The credit market primarily consists of the bond market, which links investors to companies, institutions, and governments with borrowing needs. This dissertation takes an optimization perspective upon modeling both these areas of the fixed-income market. Legislators on the national markets require financial actors to value their financial assets in accordance with market prices. Thus, prices of many assets, which are not publicly traded, must be determined mathematically. The financial quantities needed for pricing are not directly observable but must be measured through solving inverse optimization problems. These measurements are based on the available market prices, which are observed with various degrees of measurement noise. For the interbank market, the relevant financial quantities consist of term structures of interest rates, which are curves displaying the market rates for different maturities. For the bond market, credit risk is an additional factor that can be modeled through default intensity curves and term structures of recovery rates in case of default. By formulating suitable optimization models, the different underlying financial quantities can be measured in accordance with observable market prices, while conditions for economic realism are imposed. Measuring and managing risk is closely connected to the measurement of the underlying financial quantities. Through a data-driven method, we can show that six systematic risk factors can be used to explain almost all variance in the interest rate curves. By modeling the dynamics of these six risk factors, possible outcomes can be simulated in the form of term structure scenarios. For short-term simulation horizons, this results in a representation of the portfolio value distribution that is consistent with the realized outcomes from historically observed term structures. This enables more accurate measurements of interest rate risk, where our proposed method exhibits both lower risk and lower pricing errors compared to traditional models. We propose a method for decomposing changes in portfolio values for an arbitrary portfolio into the risk factors that affect the value of each instrument. By demonstrating the method for the six systematic risk factors identified for the interbank market, we show that almost all changes in portfolio value and portfolio variance can be attributed to these risk factors. Additional risk factors and approximation errors are gathered into two terms, which can be studied to ensure the quality of the performance attribution, and possibly improve it. To eliminate undesired risk within trading books, banks use hedging. Traditional methods do not take transaction costs into account. We, therefore, propose a method for managing the risks in the interbank market through a stochastic optimization model that considers transaction costs. This method is based on a scenario approximation of the optimization problem where the six systematic risk factors are simulated, and the portfolio variance is weighted against the transaction costs. This results in a method that is preferred over the traditional methods for all risk-averse investors. For the credit market, we use data from the bond market in combination with the interbank market to make accurate measurements of the financial quantities. We address the notoriously difficult problem of separating default risk from recovery risk. In addition to the previous identified six systematic risk factors for risk-free interests, we identify four risk factors that explain almost all variance in default intensities, while a single risk factor seems sufficient to model the recovery risk. Overall, this is a higher number of risk factors than is usually found in the literature. Through a simple model, we can measure the variance in bond prices in terms of these systematic risk factors, and through performance attribution, we relate these values to the empirically realized variances from the quoted bond prices. De globala ränte- och kreditmarknaderna är enorma finansiella marknader vars sammanlagda värden vida överstiger de publika aktiemarknadernas. Räntemarknaden består av räntederivat vars främsta användningsområde är hantering av ränterisker. Kreditmarknaden utgörs i första hand av obligationsmarknaden som syftar till att förmedla pengar från investerare till företag, institutioner och stater med upplåningsbehov. Denna avhandling fokuserar på att utifrån ett optimeringsperspektiv modellera både ränte- och obligationsmarknaden. Lagstiftarna på de nationella marknaderna kräver att de finansiella aktörerna värderar sina finansiella tillgångar i enlighet med marknadspriser. Därmed måste priserna på många instrument, som inte handlas publikt, beräknas matematiskt. De finansiella storheter som krävs för denna prissättning är inte direkt observerbara, utan måste mätas genom att lösa inversa optimeringsproblem. Dessa mätningar görs utifrån tillgängliga marknadspriser, som observeras med varierande grad av mätbrus. För räntemarknaden utgörs de relevanta finansiella storheterna av räntekurvor som åskådliggör marknadsräntorna för olika löptider. För obligationsmarknaden utgör kreditrisken en ytterligare faktor som modelleras via fallissemangsintensitetskurvor och kurvor kopplade till förväntat återvunnet kapital vid eventuellt fallissemang. Genom att formulera lämpliga optimeringsmodeller kan de olika underliggande finansiella storheterna mätas i enlighet med observerbara marknadspriser samtidigt som ekonomisk realism eftersträvas. Mätning och hantering av risker är nära kopplat till mätningen av de underliggande finansiella storheterna. Genom en datadriven metod kan vi visa att sex systematiska riskfaktorer kan användas för att förklara nästan all varians i räntekurvorna. Genom att modellera dynamiken i dessa sex riskfaktorer kan tänkbara utfall för räntekurvor simuleras. För kortsiktiga simuleringshorisonter resulterar detta i en representation av fördelningen av portföljvärden som väl överensstämmer med de realiserade utfallen från historiskt observerade räntekurvor. Detta möjliggör noggrannare mätningar av ränterisk där vår föreslagna metod uppvisar såväl lägre risk som mindre prissättningsfel jämfört med traditionella modeller. Vi föreslår en metod för att dekomponera portföljutvecklingen för en godtycklig portfölj till de riskfaktorer som påverkar värdet för respektive instrument. Genom att demonstrera metoden för de sex systematiska riskfaktorerna som identifierats för räntemarknaden visar vi att nästan all portföljutveckling och portföljvarians kan härledas till dessa riskfaktorer. Övriga riskfaktorer och approximationsfel samlas i två termer, vilka kan användas för att säkerställa och eventuellt förbättra kvaliteten i prestationshärledningen. För att eliminera oönskad risk i sina tradingböcker använder banker sig av hedging. Traditionella metoder tar ingen hänsyn till transaktionskostnader. Vi föreslår därför en metod för att hantera riskerna på räntemarknaden genom en stokastisk optimeringsmodell som också tar hänsyn till transaktionskostnader. Denna metod bygger på en scenarioapproximation av optimeringsproblemet där de sex systematiska riskfaktorerna simuleras och portföljvariansen vägs mot transaktionskostnaderna. Detta resulterar i en metod som, för alla riskaverta investerare, är att föredra framför de traditionella metoderna. På kreditmarknaden använder vi data från obligationsmarknaden i kombination räntemarknaden för att göra noggranna mätningar av de finansiella storheterna. Vi angriper det erkänt svåra problemet att separera fallissemangsrisk från återvinningsrisk. Förutom de tidigare sex systematiska riskfaktorerna för riskfri ränta, identifierar vi fyra riskfaktorer som förklarar nästan all varians i fallissemangsintensiteter, medan en enda riskfaktor tycks räcka för att modellera återvinningsrisken. Sammanlagt är detta ett större antal riskfaktorer än vad som brukar användas i litteraturen. Via en enkel modell kan vi mäta variansen i obligationspriser i termer av dessa systematiska riskfaktorer och genom prestationshärledningen relatera dessa värden till de empiriskt realiserade varianserna från kvoterade obligationspriser.

Download or read book Estimating and Interpreting Forward Interest Rates written by Mr.Lars E. O. Svensson and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of forward interest rates as a monetary policy indicator is demonstrated, using Sweden 1992-1994 as an example. The forward rates are interpreted as indicating market expectations of the time-path of future interest rates, future inflation rates, and future currency depreciation rates. They separate market expectations for the short-, medium-, and long-term more easily than the standard yield curve. Forward rates are estimated with an extended and more flexible version of Nelson and Siegel’s functional form.

Download or read book Yield Curve Modeling and Forecasting written by Francis X. Diebold and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately, most yield curve models tend to be theoretically rigorous but empirically disappointing, or empirically successful but theoretically lacking. In this book, Francis Diebold and Glenn Rudebusch propose two extensions of the classic yield curve model of Nelson and Siegel that are both theoretically rigorous and empirically successful. The first extension is the dynamic Nelson-Siegel model (DNS), while the second takes this dynamic version and makes it arbitrage-free (AFNS). Diebold and Rudebusch show how these two models are just slightly different implementations of a single unified approach to dynamic yield curve modeling and forecasting. They emphasize both descriptive and efficient-markets aspects, they pay special attention to the links between the yield curve and macroeconomic fundamentals, and they show why DNS and AFNS are likely to remain of lasting appeal even as alternative arbitrage-free models are developed. Based on the Econometric and Tinbergen Institutes Lectures, Yield Curve Modeling and Forecasting contains essential tools with enhanced utility for academics, central banks, governments, and industry.

Download or read book Risk written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fixed Income Modelling written by Claus Munk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A large number of securities related to various interest rates are traded in financial markets. Traders and analysts in the financial industry apply models based on economics, mathematics and probability theory to compute reasonable prices and risk measures for these securities. This book offers a unified presentation of such models and securities.

Download or read book The Term Structure of Interest Rates written by David Meiselman and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Factor Investing and Asset Allocation A Business Cycle Perspective written by Vasant Naik and published by CFA Institute Research Foundation. This book was released on 2016-12-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Capital Market Instruments written by M. Choudhry and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-11-27 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised and updated guide to some of the most important issues in the capital markets today, with an emphasis on fixed-income instruments. Fundamental concepts in equity market analysis, foreign exchange and money markets are also covered to provide a comprehensive overview. Analysis and valuation techniques are given for practical application.

Download or read book Economics of South African Townships written by Sandeep Mahajan and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries everywhere are divided within into two distinct spatial realms: one urban, one rural. Classic models of development predict faster growth in the urban sector, causing rapid migration from rural areas to cities, lifting average incomes in both places. The situation in South Africa throws up an unconventional challenge. The country has symptoms of a spatial realm that is not not rural, not fully urban, lying somewhat in limbo. This is the realm of the country’s townships and informal settlements (T&IS). In many ways, the townships and especially the informal settlements are similar to developing world slums, although never was a slum formed with as much central planning and purpose as were some of the larger South African townships. And yet, there is something distinct about the T&IS. For one thing, unlike most urban slums, most T&IS are geographically distant from urban economic centers. Exacerbated by the near absence of an affordable public transport system, this makes job seeking and other forms of economic integration prohibitively expensive. Motivated by their uniqueness and their special place in South African economic and social life, this study seeks to develop a systematic understanding of the structure of the township economy. What emerges is a rich information base on the migration patterns to T&IS, changes in their demographic profiles, their labor market characteristics, and their access to public and financial services. The study then look closely at Diepsloot, a large township in the Johannesburg Metropolitan Area, to bring out more vividly the economic realities and choices of township residents. Given the current dichotomous urban structure, modernizing the township economy and enabling its convergence with the much richer urban centers has the potential to unleash significant productivity gains. Breaking out of the current low-level equilibrium however will require a comprehensive and holistic policy agenda, with significant complementarities among the major policy reforms. While the study tells a rich and coherent story about development patterns in South African townships and points to some broad policy directions, its research and analysis will generally need to be deepened before being translated into direct policy action.

Download or read book Modern Pricing of Interest Rate Derivatives written by Riccardo Rebonato and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-16 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, interest-rate modeling has developed rapidly in terms of both practice and theory. The academic and practitioners' communities, however, have not always communicated as productively as would have been desirable. As a result, their research programs have often developed with little constructive interference. In this book, Riccardo Rebonato draws on his academic and professional experience, straddling both sides of the divide to bring together and build on what theory and trading have to offer. Rebonato begins by presenting the conceptual foundations for the application of the LIBOR market model to the pricing of interest-rate derivatives. Next he treats in great detail the calibration of this model to market prices, asking how possible and advisable it is to enforce a simultaneous fitting to several market observables. He does so with an eye not only to mathematical feasibility but also to financial justification, while devoting special scrutiny to the implications of market incompleteness. Much of the book concerns an original extension of the LIBOR market model, devised to account for implied volatility smiles. This is done by introducing a stochastic-volatility, displaced-diffusion version of the model. The emphasis again is on the financial justification and on the computational feasibility of the proposed solution to the smile problem. This book is must reading for quantitative researchers in financial houses, sophisticated practitioners in the derivatives area, and students of finance.

Download or read book FinTech in Sub Saharan African Countries written by Mr.Amadou N Sy and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FinTech is a major force shaping the structure of the financial industry in sub-Saharan Africa. New technologies are being developed and implemented in sub-Saharan Africa with the potential to change the competitive landscape in the financial industry. While it raises concerns on the emergence of vulnerabilities, FinTech challenges traditional structures and creates efficiency gains by opening up the financial services value chain. Today, FinTech is emerging as a technological enabler in the region, improving financial inclusion and serving as a catalyst for the emergence of innovations in other sectors, such as agriculture and infrastructure.