The book examines the role of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the subprime mortgage crisis. The CRAs are blamed for awarding risky securities ℓ́ℓ3-Aℓ́ℓ investment grade status and then failing to downgrade them quickly enough when circumstances changed, which led to investors suffering substantial losses. The causes identified by the regulators for the gatekeeper failure were conflic…
This book offers a comparative analysis of credit cooperative systems across 23 European countries. Cooperative banking has an important place in the financial, economic and social life of most European countries, and while cooperative banks, credit mutuals, credit cooperatives and credit unions share the spirit of cooperation and mutuality, they often have very different features, history and …
Sustainable wine businesses are being crafted around the world, fulfilling the industry's number one priority - leaving the land in better shape for the next generation. Using four case studies of wineries in both the Old and New Worlds, this book shows students and scholars how to develop and defend metrics for benchmarking wine business sustainability and justify new investments supporting th…
This edited book discusses the exciting field of Digital Creativity. Through exploring the current state of the creative industries, the authors show how technologies are reshaping our creative processes and how they are affecting the innovative creation of new products. Readers will discover how creative production processes are dominated by digital data transmission which makes the connection…
The book Introductory Business Statistics by Thomas K. Tiemann explores the basic ideas behind statistics, such as populations, samples, the difference between data and information and most importantly sampling distributions. The author covers topics including descriptive statistics and frequency distributions, normal and t-distributions, hypothesis testing, t-tests, f-tests, analysis of varian…
This book is written as an introductory text, meant for those with little or no experience with computers or information systems. While sometimes the descriptions can get a bit technical, every effort has been made to convey the information essential to understanding a topic while not getting overly focused in detailed terminology.
This book investigates the existence of stochastic and deterministic convergence of real output per worker and the sources of output (physical capital per worker, human capital per worker, total factor productivity (TFP) and average annual hours worked) in 21 OECD countries over the period 1970-2011. Towards this end, the authors apply a large battery of panel unit root and stationarity tests, …
Cooperating successfully in complex systems is a key challenge of the 21st century ℓ́ℓ a challenge we encounter in the global business context and in almost all policy fields. Whether we are looking at airport expansions, health reform, education system reform or public debt reduction, the complexity of such social change processes requires sophisticated interaction between different organ…
Whether a natural event turns into a disaster depends on the severity of the hazard as well as the condition of the social sphere of its potential victims, i.e., vulnerability. We focus on regional vulnerability considering the fact that regional socioeconomic conditions determine the aspects of the damage and thus the risk management policy. This book provides the theory and methodology to und…
During the COVID-19 crisis, the European corporate ecosystem avoided major disruptions, and corporate bankruptcy rates even declined. This outcome mostly resulted from the strength of support from monetary, financial supervisory and fiscal policies. Using the 2021 vintage of the EIB Investment Survey (EIBIS) matched with balance sheet data on firms' profits and losses, this paper investigates w…