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As a result of the recent financial crisis, there has been significant public debate on the role of the financial sector in bringing about the \"Great Depression.\" More generally, there has been debate about whether the current industry structure has enhanced social welfare or served a detrimental role. This book is a collection of papers presented at the conference held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in November 2012 that examined the social value of the financial sector as currently structured. Issues evaluated include what are the perceived benefits and costs of the current financial system? How valuable have industry innovations been for society? Should regulation be used to \"move\" the industry in a direction thought to be more valuable for society? Should \"big\" banks be broken up? What are the welfare implications of the current industry structure? In the book, leading industry scholars debate these issues with a goal of influencing public policy toward the industry.

This truly internationally-focused book is a readable, comprehensive guide to the economic geography of the world's financial centres that is as enjoyable to read as it is informative. All students and academics involved with economic geography as well as professionals in the banking and finance industries will find Financial Geography to be an indispensable book for their bookshelves. Risto Laulajainen graduated at Helsinki school of Economics, and is now Professor Emeritus at the Gothenburg School of Economics and Commercial Law, Sweden. He is a visting lecturer and Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, VA, and Aichi University of Education, Nagoya. He has published eight books, thirty refereed articles and ten book chapters.

As the global economy continues to weather the effects of the recession brought on by the financial crisis of 2007-08, perhaps no sector has been more affected and more under pressure to change than the industry that was the focus of that crisis: financial services. But as policymakers, financial experts, lobbyists, and others seek to rebuild this industry, certain questions loom large. For example, should the pay of financial institution executives be regulated to control risk taking? That possibility certainly has been raised in official circles, with spirited reactions from all corners. How will stepped-up regulation affect key parts of the financial services industry? And what lies ahead for some of the key actors in both the United States and Japan? InAfter the Crash, noted economists Yasuyuki Fuchita, Richard Herring, and Robert Litan bring together a distinguished group of experts from academia and the private sector to take a hard look at how the financial industry and some of its practices are likely to change in the years ahead. Whether or not you agree with their conclusions, the authors of this volume -the most recent collaboration between Brookings, the Wharton School, and the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research -provide well-grounded insights that will be helpful to financial practitioners, analysts, and policymakers.

The international financial community blamed the Asian crisis of 1997-1998 on deep failures of domestic financial governance. To avoid similar crises in the future, this community adopted and promoted a set of international \"best practice\" standards of financial governance. The G7 asked specialized public and private sector bodies to set international standards, and tasked the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank with their global dissemination. Non-Western countries were thereby encouraged to emulate Western practices in banking and securities supervision, corporate governance, financial disclosure, and policy transparency. InGoverning Finance, Andrew Walter explains why Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand-key targets and test cases of this international standards project-were placed under intense pressure to transform their domestic financial governance. Walter finds that the depth of the economic crisis, and more enduring aspects of Asian capitalism, such as family ownership of firms, made substantive compliance with international standards very costly for the private sector and politically difficult for governments to achieve. In spite of international compliance pressure, the result was varying degrees of cosmetic or \"mock\" compliance. In a book containing lessons for any agency or country attempting to implement lasting change in financial governance, Walter emphasizes the limits of global regulatory convergence in the absence of support from domestic politicians, institutions, and firms.

The leverage ratio (LR) is defined as the ratio of equity to total assets. We classify the sample banks, compiled from 16 OECD countries between 2011 and 2016, into two groups, i.e., strong-capital quality (SCQ) banks and weak-capital quality (WCQ) banks. We estimate both groups' cost frontiers that take allocative inefficiency (Al) and endogenous environmental variables into account. The Ais of the sample banks are found to be more serious than technical inefficiencies. To improve their AIs, we suggest that they increase the use of both inputs of fixed assets and funds, but decrease the use of labor. This saves about 40% of expenditure for the banks. The SCQ banks outperform the WCQ banks in terms of the cost technology gap ratio (CTGR) and total cost efficiency (TCE) measures. Using a simultaneous regression model and the generalized method of moments to test the hypotheses of agency cost, efficiency-risk, and franchise-value, we reject the first hypothesis, but accept the second hypothesis, under the case

The volume examines ongoing dynamics within the organizational fields of health care and higher education, as seen from an institutional theory perspective. To date, few studies have attempted to compare developments across these two critical societal sectors and actors.

Throughout the Middle East, Islamist charities and social welfare organizations play a major role in addressing the socioeconomic needs of Muslim societies, independently of the state. Through case studies of Islamic medical clinics in Egypt, the Islamic Center Charity Society in Jordan, and the Islah Women's Charitable Society in Yemen, Janine A. Clark examines the structure and dynamics of moderate Islamic institutions and their social and political impact. Questioning the widespread assumption that such organizations primarily serve the poorer classes, Clark argues that these organizations in fact are run by and for the middle class. Rather than the vertical recruitment or mobilization of the poor that they are often presumed to promote, Islamic social institutions play an important role in strengthening social networks that bind middle-class professionals, volunteers, and clients. Ties of solidarity that develop along these horizontal lines foster the development of new social networks and the diffusion of new ideas.

Islamic finance is growing at an astonishing rate and is now a 1200 billion industry, with operations in over 100 countries. This book explains the paradox of a system rooted in the medieval era thriving in the global economy. Coverage is exhaustively comprehensive, defining Islamic finance in its broadest sense to include banks, mutual funds, securities firms and insurance (or takaful) companies. The author places Islamic finance in the context of the global political and economic system and covers a wide variety of issues such as the underlying principles of Islamic finance, the range of Islamic financial products, and country differences. He also discusses a number of economic, political, regulatory and religious concerns and challenges. This second edition has been completely revised and updated to take into account the great changes and developments in the field in recent times. It includes the impact of the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks on the industry, the new forms of interaction with Western financial institutions, the emergence of innovative products such as sukuk, attempts by a broad range of financial centres - including Kuala Lumpur, London, Singapore, Bahrain and Dubai - to become global hubs of Islamic finance, and the repercussions of the 2008 global financial meltdown on Islamic institutions.

In 19th-century Leipzig, Toronto, New York, and Boston, a newly emergent group of industrialists and entrepreneurs entered into competition with older established elite groups for social recognition as well as cultural and political leadership. The competition was played out on the field of philanthropy, with the North American community gathering ideas from Europe about the establishment of cultural and public institutions. For example, to secure financing for their new museum, the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized its membership and fundraising on the model of German art museums. The process of cultural borrowing and intercultural transfer shaped urban landscapes with the building of new libraries, museums, and social housing projects. An important contribution to the relatively new field of transnational history, this book establishes philanthropy as a prime example of the conversion of economic resources into social and cultural capital.

It is sometimes said that the most segregated time of the week in the United States is Sunday morning. Even as workplaces and public institutions such as the military have become racially integrated, racial separation in Christian religious congregations is the norm. And yet some congregations remain stubbornly, racially mixed.People of the Dreamis the most complete study of this phenomenon ever undertaken. Author Michael Emerson explores such questions as: how do racially mixed congregations come together? How are they sustained? Who attends them, how did they get there, and what are their experiences? Engagingly written, the book enters the worlds of these congregations through national surveys and in-depth studies of those attending racially mixed churches. Data for the book was collected over seven years by the author and his research team. It includes more than 2,500 telephone interviews, hundreds of written surveys, and extensive visits to mixed-race congregations throughout the United States. People of the Dreamargues that multiracial congregations are bridge organizations that gather and facilitate cross-racial friendships, disproportionately housing people who have substantially more racially diverse social networks than do other Americans. The book concludes that multiracial congregations and the people in them may be harbingers of racial change to come in the United States.