Performance Of Financial Institutions (Efficiency, Innovation, Regulation)

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Performance of Financial Institutions"Harker and Zenios have produced a timely volume to help us understand the keys to superior or inferior performance of banks, insurance companies, pension funds, government agencies and other large financial institutions. The volume is now the standard reference regarding how to define and measure such efficiency and the likely effects of various firms' policy decisions and the industry context and regulations concerning their operations."-William T. Ziemba, University of British Columbia"An excellent collection of contributions to the study of the performance of financial institutions. In a period in which we observe so many changes in both financial markets and institutions, performance analysis becomes more important than ever.This book helps to find a number of important clues.- Jaap Spronk, Erasmus University, RotterdamThe efficient operation of financial intermediaries - banks, insurance and pension fund firms, government agencies - is instrumental for the efficient functioning of the financial system and the fueling of the economies of the 21st century. But what drives the performance of these institutions in today's global environment? This volume brings an interdisciplinary and international perspective to developing a deep understanding of the drivers of performance of financial institutions. World-renowned scholars from economics, finance, operations management, and marketing, and leading industry professionals, bring their expertise to bear on the issues.Patrick T. Harker is Dean, Professor of Operations and Information Management, and Senior Fellow in the Financial Institutions Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He previously directed Wharton's Fishman-Davidson Center for the Study of the Service Sector from 1989 to 1994 and chaired the Systems Engineering department in the university's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Professor Harker has published five books and more than 80 professional articles and serves as editor-in-chief of Operations Research, the leading journal in the field.Stavros A. Zenios is Professor of Management Science at the University of Cyprus, where he also served as the first Dean of the School of Economics and Management, and Senior Fellow in the Financial Institutions Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He has published six books, including Financial Optimization (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and more than 130 professional articles. Professor Zenios is currently principal investigator with the HER,MES Laboratory for Financial Modeling and Simulations, and is internationally known for his work in computational finance and operations research.