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RR 2013/259 Encyclopedia of Finance (2nd edition) Edited by Cheng-Few Lee and Alice C. Lee Springer New York, NY 2013 xx + 1019 pp. ISBN 978 1 4614 5359 8 (print); ISBN 978 1 4614 5360 4 (online) £449.50 $679 (print); £534.91 $679 (online); £562 $849 (print and online bundle)
Keywords Encyclopedias, Finance
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-05-2013-0116
Looking across the piece, we get a lot of reference works and adapted and customized variants of them in mainstream academic textbooks - in print and online formats on financial management: everything from quick reference to encyclopedias in sets for the reference shelf and distributed online access. The larger ones find their understandable way into large academic and research libraries for use by undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in finance and financial management, and in associated fields like economics and statistics and quantitative methods. The encyclopedia under review here is one of these: it is aimed at such students and researchers and lecturers "as supplementary material".
How it achieves this is worth examining because some of the contents of the Encyclopedia of Finance hit the spot with definitional and backdrop information (on topics like mergers and acquisitions, or working capital) while others open up cutting-edge approaches which are being developed for gaining a fuller quantitative understanding, say, of inter-temporal risk in derivatives, or equity premium optimization, dynamic hedging models and volatility, or cost-benefit trade-offs in corporate finance. On the plus side, this makes for variety and versatility in the reference work, and on the minus side, it means that anyone using it (or recommending its use) needs to factor in the way in which the material works at different levels of sophistication and knowledge, above all of financial models.
The work under review is the second edition: the first was published in 2006,...