Armies fight battles, states fight wars. To focus solely on armies is to neglect the broader story of victory and defeat. Military power stems from an economic base, and without wealth, soldiers ...cannot be paid, weapons cannot be procured, and food cannot be bought. War finance is among the most consequential decisions any state makes: how a state finances a war affects not only its success on the battlefield but also its economic stability and its leadership tenure. InHow States Pay for Wars, Rosella Cappella Zielinski clarifies several critical dynamics lying at the nexus of financial and military policy.
Cappella Zielinski has built a custom database on war funding over the past two centuries, and she combines those data with qualitative analyses of Truman's financing of the Korean War, Johnson's financing of the Vietnam War, British financing of World War II and the Crimean War, and Russian and Japanese financing of the Russo-Japanese War. She argues that leaders who attempt to maximize their power at home, and state power abroad, are in a constant balancing act as they try to win wars while remaining in office. As a result of political risks, they prefer war finance policies that meet the needs of the war effort within the constraints of the capacity of the state.
Game-theoretic probability and finance come of ageGlenn Shafer and Vladimir Vovk’s Probability and Finance, published in 2001, showed that perfect-information games can be used to define mathematical ...probability. Based on fifteen years of further research, Game-Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance presents a mature view of the foundational role game theory can play. Its account of probability theory opens the way to new methods of prediction and testing and makes many statistical methods more transparent and widely usable. Its contributions to finance theory include purely game-theoretic accounts of Ito’s stochastic calculus, the capital asset pricing model, the equity premium, and portfolio theory.Game-Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance is a book of research. It is also a teaching resource. Each chapter is supplemented with carefully designed exercises and notes relating the new theory to its historical context.Praise from early readers“Ever since Kolmogorov's Grundbegriffe, the standard mathematical treatment of probability theory has been measure-theoretic. In this ground-breaking work, Shafer and Vovk give a game-theoretic foundation instead. While being just as rigorous, the game-theoretic approach allows for vast and useful generalizations of classical measure-theoretic results, while also giving rise to new, radical ideas for prediction, statistics and mathematical finance without stochastic assumptions. The authors set out their theory in great detail, resulting in what is definitely one of the most important books on the foundations of probability to have appeared in the last few decades.” – Peter Grünwald, CWI and University of Leiden“Shafer and Vovk have thoroughly re-written their 2001 book on the game-theoretic foundations for probability and for finance. They have included an account of the tremendous growth that has occurred since, in the game-theoretic and pathwise approaches to stochastic analysis and in their applications to continuous-time finance. This new book will undoubtedly spur a better understanding of the foundations of these very important fields, and we should all be grateful to its authors.” – Ioannis Karatzas, Columbia University
This book provides a new institutional economics perspective on alternative models of local governance, offering a comprehensive view of local government organization and finance in the developing ...world. The experiences of ten developing/transition economies are reviewed to draw lessons of general interest in strengthening responsive, responsible, and accountable local governance. The book is written in simple user friendly language to facilitate a wider readership by policy makers and practitioners in addition to students and scholars of public finance, economics and politics.
This open access book identifies and analyses problems of text production in finance from three complementary perspectives: problem identification, problem analysis, and problem solution. By doing ...so, it explains why solving these problems in transdisciplinary collaboration benefits theory, practice, and society at large. Drawing on 25 years of ethnographic research, roughly 2100 text products, and more than 190 interviews with different stakeholders, it develops and evaluates measures to improve the communicative potential of financial texts and thereby make them accessible to professionals. The book will appeal to researchers and reflective practitioners in financial communication, organizational communication, financial analysis, investor relations, journalism, and applied linguistics.
