The term “financial psychopath” was coined after the financial crisis of 2007−2008. Intended as a term of derision, the media used it to negatively label financial professionals, rather than to draw a clinical profile. The expression succinctly conveys the widespread post−2008 public...

This chapter discusses the role of speculation in the financial markets that influences individual and group behavior in the form of bubbles and crashes. The chapter highlights behavioral finance issues associated with bubbles, such as overconfidence, herding, group polarization, group-think...

Standard or traditional finance research is based on the rational choice model that assumes market participants are fully rational, unbiased, emotionless, self-interested maximizers of expected utility. Recent research in behavioral finance recognizes that real-world investors and managers are...

The historic financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 seriously affected investors. In general, stock market values declined by about 50 percent but largely recovered from pre-crisis levels by the end of 2012 due in part to unprecedented stimulus efforts. Nonetheless, the cumulative return on stocks...

This paper will provide information on what happened in the financial crisis of 2008 and how to graph volatility outside of the option market. We will investigate the causes of the financial crisis, as well as some of the social inequalities that still exist today. We will explore household...

This paper aims to evaluate the effects of macroeconomic policy between 2007 and 2011 in the Northeast Region of Brazil, which is the most impoverished region of the country. It focus specifically on monetary and credit policies. The reason for this study stems from the observation that the...

The usual enterprises tend to be governed by specialists of single professions, whose education for interdisciplinary creative cooperation is very rare, rather than by persons with knowledge of systems theory. Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1978: VII) explicitly stated that he had created his General...

Agency theory suggests that as external dedicated ownership increases in a firm, the agents would act more responsibly (i.e. extract less rent) and executives' interests are more likely to be better aligned with those of the shareholders. We explore the role of the government as an owner during...