Financial Decision Making Theory And Practice

Based on courses developed by the author over several years, this book provides access to a broad area of research that is not available in separate articles or books of readings. Topics covered include the meaning and measurement of risk, general single-period portfolio problems, mean-variance analysis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the Arbitrage Pricing Theory, complete markets, multiperiod portfolio problems and the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model, the Black-Scholes option pricing model and contingent claims analysis, 'risk-neutral' pricing with Martingales, Modigliani-Miller and the capital structure of the firm, interest rates and the term structure, and others.

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II.Part I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Part II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management Using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. The handbook plus the book of problems form a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as supplementary text in finance theory, financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vickson in 1975 (updated 2 nd edition published in 2006).

Accountants have to study finance before they qualify. This provides them with a strong knowledge of money. In September 2007 The Times reported that people with accountancy degrees have the highest earnings premium in the marketplace (higher than those who study medicine or law).

Business Finance is suitable for undergraduates in accounting and finance and for those on finance and financial management courses. It is also appropriate for postgraduate students with an option in accounting and finance and will be highly useful for professional accounting students.

Now in its 7th edition, Business Finance is an essential introduction to financial decision making in businesses. Taking a user's perspective it explores the type of investments a business should make and how they should be financed, and successfully blends the theoretical, analytical and practical aspects of finance and investment. This new edition of Business Finance has a real-world flavour, exploring the theories surrounding financial decision making and relating these theories to what happens in the real world. Key Features include: an extensive range of real world examples; solid theoretical underpinning in an easily accessible form; excellent blend of theory and practice offering a comprehensive insight into the decision making process within finance and investment; exploration into, and explanation of, any divergence between theory and practice; comprehensive coverage of the latest international issues;

Decision-makers in business and economics face a staggering array of problems. For example, managers of growing firms have to decide when to expand their business, governments have to decide whether to undertake large infrastructure investments, and managers of oil firms must decide how rapidly to deplete their reserves. While these problems seem quite diverse, they all share many important features. In each case, the decision-maker must choose when to take a particular action that will be potentially impossible to reverse, and the consequences of taking (or not taking) that action are uncertain. Also, the timing and nature of these actions directly affect the cash flows generated by the entities they manage. This book explains how techniques originally developed to price financial derivatives can be used to analyze real-world decisions, and provides the tools necessary to put them into practice. The real options analysis approach to decision-making is built on strong theoretical foundations, and is widely discussed in practitioner literature, but often only at a fairly intuitive level. What practitioners need-and what this book delivers-is a structured approach to systematically applying real options analysis to the wide variety of problems they will meet in business and economics. Real Options in Theory and Practice focuses on building up a general approach to solving real options problems from the ground up. Rather than aiming to build a "black box" to solve a small set of standardized real options problems, it describes the building blocks of any successful real options analysis and shows how they can be assembled in a way that is appropriate to the problem being analyzed. For both practitioners and academics, Real Options in Theory and Practice will serve as an authoritative and invaluable resource for those looking for effective and practical solutions to complex, real-life problems.