A proposal for using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the socioeconomic impact of public investment in large scientific projects. Large particle accelerators, outer space probes, genomics platforms: all are scientific enterprises managed through the new form of the research infrastructure, in which communities of scientists collaborate across nations, universities, research institutions, and disciplines. Such large projects are often publicly funded, with no accepted way to measure the benefits to society of these investments. In this book, Massimo Florio suggests the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to evaluate the socioeconomic impact of public investment in large and costly scientific projects. The core concept of CBA of any infrastructure is to undertake the consistent intertemporal accounting of social welfare effects using the available information. Florio develops a simple framework for such accounting in the research infrastructure context and then offers a systematic analysis of the benefits in terms of the social agents involved. He measures the benefits to scientists, students, and postdoctoral researchers; the effect on firms of knowledge spillovers; the benefits to users of information technology and science-based innovation; the welfare effects on the general public of cultural services provided by RIs; and the willingness of taxpayers to fund scientific knowledge creation. Finally, Florio shows how these costs and benefits can be expressed in the form of stochastic net present value and other summary indicators.

This book provides thorough and highly accessible mathematical coverage of the fundamental topics of intermediate investments, including fixed-income securities, capital asset pricing theory, derivatives, and innovations in optimal portfolio growth and valuation of multi-period risky investments. This text presents essential ideas of investments and their applications, offering students the most comprehensive treatment of the subject available.

Financial markets continually evolve, but underneath these innovations are fundamental principles-such as present value, leverage, hedging, efficient markets, and the conservation of value. These enduring principles are more important than transitory details. Investing is not a multiple-choice test that can be passed by memorizing soon-obsolete facts like the name of the largest brokerage firm or the number of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher-in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. The same could be said of the master investor. Our understanding of financial markets and investments depends on mathematical analysis. How could we predict investment income without models? How could we calculate present values without equations? How could we gauge uncertainty without statistics? However, a deep understanding of investments depends on our recognition of the limitations of models, no matter how scientific they appear, no matter if they were developed by Nobel laureates. The Art and Science of Investing explains the financial models that are most useful for investors, and also explains how their usefulness depends critically on a recognition of their limitations-why there is both a science and an art to successful investing.

The financial industry has recently adopted Python at a tremendous rate, with some of the largest investment banks and hedge funds using it to build core trading and risk management systems. Updated for Python 3, the second edition of this hands-on book helps you get started with the language, guiding developers and quantitative analysts through Python libraries and tools for building financial applications and interactive financial analytics. Using practical examples throughout the book, author Yves Hilpisch also shows you how to develop a full-fledged framework for Monte Carlo simulation-based derivatives and risk analytics, based on a large, realistic case study. Much of the book uses interactive IPython Notebooks.

This revised sixth edition lays a firm foundation for thinking about and conducting investment. It does this by helping to build capital markets intuition and critical thinking skills. The material in this book is the product of 25 years of investment experience and 20 painstaking years of destructive testing in university classrooms. Although the topic is applied investments, the integration of finance, economics, accounting, pure mathematics, statistics, numerical techniques, and spreadsheets (or programming) make this an ideal capstone course at the advanced undergraduate or masters/MBA level. The book has a heavily scientific/quantitative focus, but the material should be accessible to a motivated practitioner or talented individual investor with (for the most part) only high school level mathematics. Although aimed at the advanced undergraduate or masters/MBA level, the careful explanations of a wide range of advanced capital markets topics makes this an excellent book for a U.S. PhD student in need of an easily accessible foundation course in capital markets theory and practice. There are literature reviews of multiple advanced areas, and many research questions are identified that need to be answered to fill gaps in the literature; these research questions would be ideal for a master's thesis or a chapter of a PhD. The applied nature of the book also makes it ideal for capital markets practitioners. For example, in one exercise, the reader is taken by the hand and walked through construction of a worked spreadsheet example of an active alpha optimization using actual stock market data. (The reader gets to build ex-ante alphas, and feed them into an optimization that weighs returns, risk, and transaction costs. A portfolio is rebalanced based on the optimization, and ultimately a backtest is conducted to measure ex post alpha.) Other practitioner material includes advanced time value of money exercises, a review of retirement topics, an extensive discussion of dividends, P/E ratios, transaction costs, the CAPM, and value versus growth versus glamour, and a review of more than 100 years of stock market performance, and more than 200 years of interest rates. The list of references at the end of this edition of the book has over 900 items from the academic and practitioner literature. The index has over 7,000 entries (in over 3,900 lines). Special attention is paid to difficult topics like the Roll critique, smart beta, factor-based investing, and Grinold-Kahn versus Black-Litterman models. Every investor needs capital markets intuition and critical thinking skills to conduct confident, deliberate, and skeptical investment. The overarching goal of this book is to help investors build these skills.

Dinosaurs are every students fascination. Reproducible, hands-on activities give students the opportunity to experience how the scientific process works and how scientists form and test conclusions. Students build and employ skills in analysis, drawing, measuring, graphing, and arithmetic; exercise research and library skills to acquire data necessary to complete the activities; and apply critical-thinking skills to extrapolate from the known to the unknown-the fundamental process that makes science work. Grades 4-12.

How much do you know about the principles of investing? How many books have you read about finance? And yet, how many times have your investments still fallen short of your expectations? A lot of people assume that the more you know about finances, the more successful you'll be. But truthfully, no matter how well versed you are, you're probably still leaving money on the table. Confident investing is about much more than having the right knowledge. It's about making the right choices. Money off the Table draws on multidisciplinary research on human decision-making to explain how investment decisions can go wrong, and what you can do to make them better. Using behavioral economics, sociology, and firsthand knowledge of financial planning, Tony Sablan and Nika Kabiri will teach you how to avoid the common pitfalls that plague even the most seasoned investors. No matter how volatile the market, you can succeed. You just need the right mindset.

This new edited volume consists of a collection of original articles written by leading industry experts in the area of factor investing.The chapters introduce readers to some of the latest research developments in the area of equity and alternative investment strategies.Each chapter deals with new methods for constructing and harvesting traditional and alternative risk premia, building strategic and tactical multifactor portfolios, and assessing related systematic investment performances. This volume will be of help to portfolio managers, asset owners and consultants, as well as academics and students who want to improve their knowledge and understanding of systematic risk factor investing. A practical scope An extensive coverage and up-to-date researcch contributions Covers the topic of factor investing strategies which are increasingly popular amongst practitioners