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RR 2006/17 Encyclopedia of Finance Edited by Cheng-Few Lee and Alice C. Lee Springer Verlag Heidelberg and New York, NY 2006 xvi + 855 pp. ISBN 0 387 26284 9 £191.50; $299.00 Also available as an e-book (ISBN 0 387 262336 5)
Keywords Encyclopedias, Finance
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120710719518
Finance can be studied in many ways and at many levels. If, as here, we accept that the term "finance" includes financial management and corporate finance, investment analysis and portfolio management, international finance, markets and microstructures, asset pricing and the behaviour of stocks and bonds, financial institutions, derivatives, property (or real estate) and risk management, then it is easy to see why there are so many works and courses in the field. Increasingly, too, action-based and academic research (and especially model-based and quantitative research) is establishing itself as credible in the world of finance, building on traditional interest in mainstream financial matters like company financial control, stock valuation and shareholder behaviour.
This encyclopedia enters the field with good credentials, both the publisher Springer and the editors, one of whom, Cheng-Few Lee (Professor of Finance at Rutgers Business School), is recognized for his quantitative work in finance. The series Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting over the last decade or so attests to this. And I personally found it fascinating to read. The work is intended to reflect the many-sidedness of finance and its increasing internationalization. Finance is rightly unavoidable in any serious training in management today. The editors say in their preface that it is aimed at "both students and professionals".
It comes as a one-volume reference work in two parts - the first is a glossary (called mysteriously Terminology and Essays), some 300 pages, and the second consists of 50 papers by (mainly US academics), making up the rest of the book. A short series of appendices provide further quantitative material and there is a references section and two indexes, by subject and...