This book presents a consistent and complete framework for studying the risk management of a pension fund. It gives the reader the opportunity to understand, replicate and widen the analysis. To this aim, the book provides all the tools for computing the optimal asset allocation in a dynamic framework where the financial horizon is stochastic (longevity risk) and the investor's wealth is not self-financed. This tutorial enables the reader to replicate all the results presented. The R codes are provided alongside the presentation of the theoretical framework. The book explains and discusses the problem of hedging longevity risk even in an incomplete market, though strong theoretical results about an incomplete framework are still lacking and the problem is still being discussed in most recent literature.

Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is becoming a popular statistical framework in many fields and disciplines of the social sciences. The main reason for this popularity is that PLS-SEM can be used to estimate models including latent variables, observed variables, or a combination of these. The popularity of PLS-SEM is predicted to increase even more as a result of the development of new and more robust estimation approaches, such as consistent PLS-SEM. The traditional and modern estimation methods for PLS-SEM are now readily facilitated by both open-source and commercial software packages.

This book presents PLS-SEM as a useful practical statistical toolbox that can be used for estimating many different types of research models. In so doing, the authors provide the necessary technical prerequisites and theoretical treatment of various aspects of PLS-SEM prior to practical applications. What makes the book unique is the fact that it thoroughly explains and extensively uses comprehensive Stata (plssem) and R (cSEM and plspm) packages for carrying out PLS-SEM analysis. The book aims to help the reader understand the mechanics behind PLS-SEM as well as performing it for publication purposes.

Features:

• Intuitive and technical explanations of PLS-SEM methods
• Complete explanations of Stata and R packages
• Lots of example applications of the methodology
• Detailed interpretation of software output
• Reporting of a PLS-SEM study
• Github repository for supplementary book material

The book is primarily aimed at researchers and graduate students from statistics, social science, psychology, and other disciplines. Technical details have been moved from the main body of the text into appendices, but it would be useful if the reader has a solid background in linear regression analysis.

This book is aimed at conservation and development practitioners who need to learn and use R in a part-time professional context. It gives people with a non-technical background a set of skills to graph, map, and model in R. It also provides background on data integration in project management and covers fundamental statistical concepts. The book aims to demystify R and give practitioners the confidence to use it.

Key Features:

* Viewing data science as part of a greater knowledge and decision making system
* Foundation sections on inference, evidence, and data integration
* Plain English explanations of R functions
* Relatable examples which are typical of activities undertaken by conservation and development organisations in the developing world
* Worked examples showing how data analysis can be incorporated into project reports

This book examines John Locke as a theorist of migration, immigration, and the movement of peoples. It outlines the contours of the public discourse surrounding migration in the seventeenth century and situates Locke's in-depth involvement in these debates. The volume presents a variety of undercurrents in Locke's writing - his ideas on populationism, naturalization, colonization and the right to withdrawal, the plight of refugees, and territorial rights - which have great import in present-day debates about migration. Departing from the popular extant literature that sees Locke advocating for a strong right to exclude foreigners, the author proposes a Lockean theory of immigration that recognizes the fundamental right to emigrate, thus catering to an age wrought with terrorism, xenophobia and economic inequality.

A unique and compelling contribution, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political theory, political philosophy, history of international politics, international relations, international political economy, public policy, seventeenth century English history, migration and citizenship studies, and moral philosophy.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the latest econometric methods for studying the dynamics of macroeconomic and financial time series. It examines alternative methodological approaches and concepts, including quantile spectra and co-spectra, and explores topics such as non-linear and non-stationary behavior, stochastic volatility models, and the econometrics of commodity markets and globalization. Furthermore, it demonstrates the application of recent techniques in various fields: in the frequency domain, in the analysis of persistent dynamics, in the estimation of state space models and new classes of volatility models.

The book is divided into two parts: The first part applies econometrics to the field of macroeconomics, discussing trend/cycle decomposition, growth analysis, monetary policy and international trade. The second part applies econometrics to a wide range of topics in financial economics, including price dynamics in equity, commodity and foreign exchange markets and portfolio analysis. The book is essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in government and financial institutions interested in applying recent econometric time series methods to financial and economic data.

Economic growth and increasing population impose long-term risks to the environment and society. Approaches to address the impact of consumption and production on bio-diversity loss, resource availability, climate change, and mounting waste problems on land and in seas have yet not proven to be successful. This calls for innovative approaches to address the complex environmental, social, and economic interrelationships that have to be addressed in transforming to sustainable development.

Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume I: Challenges and Development aims to explore critical global challenges and addresses how consumers, producers, the private sector, international organizations, and governments can play an active role in innovating businesses to support a transitioning towards sustainable consumption and production. The book explores different approaches and innovations to address sustainable consumption and production. It details multiple social and economic contexts to the challenges and developments towards a sustainable consumption and production. The book is of interest to economists, students, businesses, and policymakers.

Made Up exposes the multibillion-dollar beauty industry that promotes unrealistic beauty standards through a market basket of advertising tricks, techniques, and technologies.

Cosmetics magnate Charles Revson, a founder of Revlon, was quoted as saying, "In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope." This pioneering entrepreneur, who built an empire on the foundation of nail polish, captured the unvarnished truth about the beauty business in a single metaphor: hope in a jar.



Made Up: How the Beauty Industry Manipulates Consumers, Preys on Women's Insecurities, and Promotes Unattainable Beauty Standards is a thorough examination of innovative, and often controversial, advertising practices used by beauty companies to persuade consumers, mainly women, to buy discretionary goods like cosmetics and scents. These approaches are clearly working: the average American woman will spend around $300,000 on facial products alone during her lifetime.



This revealing book traces the evolution of the global beauty industry, discovers what makes beauty consumers tick, explores the persistence and pervasiveness of the feminine beauty ideal, and investigates the myth-making power of beauty advertising. It also examines stereotypical portrayals of women in beauty ads, looks at celebrity beauty endorsements, and dissects the "looks industry."



Made Upuncovers the reality behind an Elysian world of fantasy and romance created by beauty brands that won't tell women the truth about beauty.

Same-sex marriage is now legal in twenty-nine countries and the subject of continued debate around the world. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique considers this debate from a political economy perspective. Rather than engaging directly in the now well-rehearsed social-movement and academic for-and-against debates, this book focuses on processes of institutionalization of same-sex marriage and so-called "rainbow families" within (neo)liberal capitalist democracies. It examines how states and markets appropriate same-sex marriage and family to enhance their own political and symbolic capital, consolidating power and profit within existing systems of gendered and raced socioeconomic stratification.

Taking a radical feminist, heterodox, qualitative and intersectional approach, this book investigates the political economy of same-sex marriage across three axes: same-sex marriage as institution; same-sex marriage and the market; and the political economy of the "rainbow family". The examination of case studies from different countries and regions enables a comparative analysis that foregrounds cultural, political and economic path dependencies while at the same time highlighting a number of striking commonalities. In all the countries discussed in this book and in most respects, same-sex marriage has been integrated almost seamlessly into a mainstream/malestream political economy of marriage and family and its translation into added market and productive value.

The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique will be of use to researchers and students alike, and indeed to all those who are curious about the mainstreaming of homosexuality within twenty-first-century capitalist democracies.

A Psychoanalytical-Historical Perspective on Capitalism and Politics explores how empathy once shaped the collective unconscious, before being replaced by rampant individualistic drive to power.

Mino Vianello uses "radical federalism" to define a new approach to democracy, hoping for an end to the repetition of outdated political and economic ideals to solve the world's democratic crisis. The book brings together a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, including Marxism, history, class, feminism, politics and empathy, to provide a comprehensive and honest history of power from the Enlightenment to the present day.

This interdisciplinary study will be key reading for academics and scholars of Jungian studies, politics, sociology, history and economics.

Spiralling inequality since the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008 have been the two most important challenges to democratic capitalism since the Great Depression. To understand the political economy of contemporary Europe and America we must, therefore, put inequality and crisis at the heart of the picture.

In this innovative new textbook Mattias Vermeiren does just this, demonstrating that both the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis resulted from a mutually reinforcing but ultimately unsustainable relationship between countries with debt-led and export-led growth models, models fundamentally shaped by soaring income and wealth inequality. He traces the emergence of these two growth models by giving a comprehensive overview, deeply informed by the comparative and international political economy literature, of recent developments in the four key domains that have shaped the dynamics of crisis and inequality: macroeconomic policy, social policy, corporate governance and financial policy. He goes on to assess the prospects for the emergence of a more egalitarian and sustainable form of democratic capitalism.

This fresh and insightful overview of contemporary Western capitalism will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international and comparative political economy.

This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to panel data econometrics, an area that has enjoyed considerable growth over the last two decades. Micro and Macro panels are becoming increasingly available, and methods for dealing with these types of data are in high demand among practitioners. Software programs have fostered this growth, including freely available programs in R and numerous user-written programs in both Stata and EViews.

This new sixth edition has been fully revised and updated, and includes new material on dynamic panels, limited dependent variables and nonstationary panels, as well as spatial panel data. The author also provides empirical illustrations and examples using Stata and EViews.

"This book is the most comprehensive work available on panel data. It is written by one of the leading contributors to the field, and is notable for its encyclopaedic coverage and its clarity of exposition. It is useful to theorists and to people doing applied work using panel data. It is valuable as a text for a course in panel data, as a supplementary text for more general courses in econometrics, and as a reference."
Professor Peter Schmidt, Michigan State University, USA.

"Panel data econometrics is in its ascendancy, combining the power of cross section averaging with all the subtleties of temporal and spatial dependence. Badi Baltagi provides a remarkable roadmap of this fascinating interface of econometric method, enticing the novitiate with technical gentleness, the expert with comprehensive coverage and the practitioner with many empirical applications."
Professor Peter C. B. Phillips, Cowles Foundation, Yale University, USA.

This handbook presents emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of econometric techniques for the financial sector and their applications in economics. By doing so, it offers invaluable tools for predicting and weighing the risks of multiple investments by incorporating data analysis. Throughout the book the authors address a broad range of topics such as predictive analysis, monetary policy, economic growth, systemic risk and investment behavior.

This book considers three relationships: law and economics; economics and game theory; and game theory and law. Economists teach lawyers that economic principles cut across and integrate seemingly different legal subjects such as contracts, torts, and property. Correspondingly, lawyers teach economists that legal rationality is a separate and distinct decision-making process that can be formalized by behavioral rules that are parallel to and comparable with the behavioral rules of economic rationality, that efficiency often must be constrained by legal goals such as equal protection of the laws, due process, and horizontal and distributional equity, and that the general case methodology of economics vs. the hard case methodology of law for determining the truth or falsity of economic theories and theorems sometimes conflict.

Economics and Game Theory: Law and economics books focus on economic analysis of judges' decisions in common law cases and have been mostly limited to contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and suit and settlement. There is usually no discussion of the many areas of law that require cooperative action such as is needed to provide economic infrastructure, control public "bad" type externalities, and make legislation. Game theory provides the bridge between competitive markets and the missing discussion of cooperative action in law and economics. How? Competitive markets are examples (subset) of the Prisoners' Dilemma, which explains the conflict between individual self-interested behavior and cooperation both in economic markets and in legislative bodies and demonstrates the need for social infrastructure and regulation of pollution and global warming.

Game Theory and Law: Lawsuits usually involve litigation between two parties, not the myriad participants in markets, so the assumption of self-interest constrained by markets does not carry over to legal disputes involving one-on-one bargaining in which the law gives one party superior bargaining power. Game theory models predict the effect of different legal institutions, rights, and rules on the outcome of such bargaining. Game theory also has a natural four-model framework which is used in this book to analyze the law and economics of civil obligation, which consists of torts (negligence), contracts, and unjust enrichment.

This book demonstrates the continuing relevance of Marx's critique of the capitalist system, in which value is simply equated with market price. It includes chapters specifically on the environment and financialisation, and presents Marx's qualitative theory of value and the associated concept of fetishism in a clear and comprehensive manner. Section I demonstrates how fetishism developed in Marx's writing from a journalistic metaphor to an analytical device central to his critique. In Section II, commodity fetishism is distinguished from other forms: of money, capital and interest-bearing capital. There follows an analysis of Marx's complex attempt to distinguish his argument from that of Ricardo, and Samuel Bailey. The section ends with a discussion of the ontological status of value: as a social rather than a natural phenomenon. Section III considers the merits of understanding value by analogy with language, and critically assesses the merits of structural Marxism. Section IV challenges Marx's emphasis solely on production, and considers also exchange and consumption as social relations. Section V critically assesses recent Marx-inspired literature relating to the two key crises of our time, finance and the environment, and identifies strong similarities between the key analytical questions that have been debated in each case.

From artificial intelligence to identity theft, from what we once thought of as unshakeable institutions to increasing concerns about privacy and sustainability, consumer issues are an integral part of daily life. This updated fourth edition of Consumer Economics offers students an accessible and thorough guide to the concerns surrounding the modern consumer and brings to light the repercussions of making uninformed decisions in today's global economy.

This definitive textbook introduces students to these potential issues and covers other key topics including consumer behavior, the history of the consumer movement, personal finance, legal rights and responsibilities, and marketing and advertising. Combining theory and practice, students are introduced to both the fundamentals of consumer economics and how to become better-informed consumers themselves.

Highlights in this new edition include the following:

• New case studies and critical thinking projects to encourage students to develop their critical thinking skills through analyzing consumer issues.
• Expanded coverage of social media and the impact of social influence on consumers.
• Revised consumer alerts: practical advice and guidance to help students make smart consumer decisions.
• A companion website with PowerPoint slides for each chapter.

Fully updated, this textbook is suitable for students studying consumer sciences-what works, what does not, and how consumers are changing.