Global Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath

In The Global Financial Crisis, contributors argue that the complexity of the Global Financial Crisis challenges researchers to offer more comprehensive explanations by extending the scope and range of their traditional investigations. To achieve this, the volume views the financial crisis simultaneously through three different lenses---economic, psychological, and social values. Contributors offer a constructive methodology suitable for exploring financial crises. They recognize how current economic analysis did not prepare academic economists, business economists, traders, and regulators to anticipate economic and financial crises. So, they search more extensively within the broader discipline of economics for ideas related to crises but neglected perhaps because they were not mathematically rigorous. They affirm that the complexity of financial crises necessitates complementary research. Thus, to put the focal purpose of this book differently, they explore the Global Financial Crisis from three interconnected frameworks: the standards of orthodox economic analysis, Minskyan economics, and the role of ideas and values in economics. Values are the subject of both philosophy and psychology and can contribute to a better understanding of the Global Financial Crisis. Values, in general, have been relatively neglected by economists. This is not because there is doubt about their significance, but rather because welfare economics and collective choice still operate within the neoclassical paradigm. This volume argues that analyzing the value implications requires moving from the neoclassical framework to something that is broader and multidisciplinary.

A.G. (Tassos) Malliaris is currently Professor of Economics and Finance and holds the Walter F. Mullady Sr. Chair in Business Administration at Loyola University Chicago. He specializes in financial economics and has made several contributions in the area of futures markets, options markets and risk management. He is President of the Athenian Policy Forum and Past-President of the Multinational Finance Society and the North American Economic and Finance Association. He has served as a member of boards of directors or investments committees in several organizations and is editor or associate editor in five journals. Leslie Shaw has an MBA and PhD in Behavioral Economics from the University of Chicago. After her PhD she completed five years of Post Doctoral work and graduated from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis with a special interest in integrating theoretical psychoanalysis with the cognitive theoretical approaches that are foundational to Behavioral Economics. Prior to her doctoral work at the University of Chicago she spent several years in a variety of project management positions for one of the large international management-consulting firms. This valuable traditional MBA consulting experience provided her with a pragmatic business acumen in her study of the fallible aspects of judgment and decision processes within organizations. Leslie has been an invited speaker at a variety of business occasions and professional psychological conferences. Hersh Shefrin is the Mario L. Belotti Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University. He has published widely on a wide range of topics in mathematics, finance, and economics and is best known for his work in behavioral finance. A 2003 article in the American Economic Review includes him in the top 15 economic theorists to have influenced empirical work. His work is known for several firsts: an economic theory of self-control featuring a formal system 1/system 2 model, a behavioral explanation for the dividend puzzle, the disposition effect, behavioral portfolio theory, behavioral corporate finance, and behavioral pricing kernel theory.