Effective Crisis Communication or Asset Pricing

Effective Crisis Communication: Moving From Crisis to Opportunity

Author: Timothy L Sellnow

"This book sets a new standard for academics, students, and professionals who desire a comprehensive volume that encapsulates the most recent and up-to-date research on crisis management. The authors have written an important work that speaks to our post-9/11 world, one that demonstrates a mature understanding of crises and how organizations can and should respond to them communicatively." --Keith Michael Hearit, Western Michigan University  

Effective Crisis Communication: Moving from Crisis to Opportunity provides the reader practical advice on how to effectively manage and overcome a crisis. Authors Robert R. Ulmer, Timothy L. Sellnow, and Matthew W. Seeger provide guidelines for taking the many challenges that crises present and turning those challenges into opportunities for overcoming a crisis.  

Key Features:

• Brings together theory and experience: This book introduces readers to sound research and best practices in the field of crisis communication. Introductory chapters offer practical lessons on managing uncertainty, effective crisis communication, and productive crisis leadership that help readers evaluate case studies in later chapters.
• Provides advice on how to create opportunity from crisis: Unlike other crisis communication texts, this book explains how organizations can and should emerge from crises as better organizations. Examples and lessons on how to capitalize on the opportunities inherent to crisis are provided through organizational learning, sound ethical practices, and risk communication. In addition, the book provides advice on how to createrenewal and growth following a crisis.
• Addresses prominent and diverse cases: Cases and practical applications from a wide variety of crises are included, such as food-borne illness outbreaks, terrorism, industrial disasters, and natural disasters. "You Make the Call" exercises allow readers to examine and critique the decisions made in such important cases such as 9/11, Malden Mills, and the 2003 California fires.  

Intended Audience:
The combination of practical lessons with vivid examples makes this a valuable supplemental text for courses in crisis communication from the perspectives of Public Relations, Health Communication, Risk Communication, and Business Communication. In addition, it serves as an excellent resource for practitioners of crisis and risk communication in industry.    

Interesting book: Introduction to Animal Science or Financial Markets and Corporate Strategy

Asset Pricing

Author: John H Cochran

Winner of the prestigious Paul A. Samuelson Award for scholarly writing on lifelong financial security, John Cochrane's Asset Pricing now appears in a revised edition that unifies and brings the science of asset pricing up to date for advanced students and professionals. Cochrane traces the pricing of all assets back to a single idea--price equals expected discounted payoff--that captures the macro-economic risks underlying each security's value. By using a single, stochastic discount factor rather than a separate set of tricks for each asset class, Cochrane builds a unified account of modern asset pricing. He presents applications to stocks, bonds, and options. Each model--consumption based, CAPM, multifactor, term structure, and option pricing--is derived as a different specification of the discounted factor.

The discount factor framework also leads to a state-space geometry for mean-variance frontiers and asset pricing models. It puts payoffs in different states of nature on the axes rather than mean and variance of return, leading to a new and conveniently linear geometrical representation of asset pricing ideas.

Cochrane approaches empirical work with the Generalized Method of Moments, which studies sample average prices and discounted payoffs to determine whether price does equal expected discounted payoff. He translates between the discount factor, GMM, and state-space language and the beta, mean-variance, and regression language common in empirical work and earlier theory.

The book also includes a review of recent empirical work on return predictability, value and other puzzles in the cross section, and equity premium puzzles and their resolution. Written to be asummary for academics and professionals as well as a textbook, this book condenses and advances recent scholarship in financial economics.

What People Are Saying

Michael Brennan
This is a beautiful book that uses the elegant simplicity of the stochastic discount factor to present a general theory of the pricing of stocks,bonds,and derivatives and a practical approach to estimating particular models derived from the general theory. It will help experts in the field to consolidate their knowledge and beginners to appreciate the unity of asset pricing theory. Cochrane uses his mastery of the subject to present it in a clear and compelling manner that is easily accessible.

Robert J. Shiller
This is an impressive treatise of very high quality. It is a serious scholarly monograph,of interest to those who are working to advance financial theory,and it can also serve as a textbook in an advanced finance course. It is thoughtful,inductive,and comprehensive.

Yacine Ait-Sahalia
An excellent survey of asset pricing theory and applications from the modern viewpoint of stochastic discount factors and their associated geometry. This book was already a classic among finance scholars and on Ph.D. syllabi when it circulated in the form of class notes. It will also prove highly useful to practitioners who seek and in-depth introduction to these tools.

John Y. Campbell
This book represents an exciting step forward in the exposition of financial economics. The last twenty years of finance research have advanced and enriched the field,and textbook treatments have lagged behind these developments. This text will replace the previous generation of books and should have a broad market. It is written in an informal,almost breezy style that will appeal to students and is divided into small,easily digested chapters. . . . The book moves easily between discrete-time and continuous-time models. This is an excellent thing as it encourages students to see beyond the formalism to the underlying economics. I strongly recommend it as an advanced finance text.

Table of Contents:

1	Consumption-based model and overview	3
2	Applying the basic model	35
3	Contingent claims markets	49
4	The discount factor	61
5	Mean-variance frontier and beta representations	77
6	Relation between discount factors, betas, and mean-variance frontiers	99
7	Implications of existence and equivalence theorems	121
8	Conditioning information	131
9	Factor pricing models	149
10	GMM in explicit discount factor models	189
11	GMM : general formulas and applications	201
12	Regression-based tests of linear factor models	229
13	GMM for linear factor models in discount factor form	253
14	Maximum likelihood	267
15	Time-series, cross-section, and GMM/DF tests of linear factor models	279
16	Which method?	293
17	Option pricing	313
18	Option pricing without perfect replication	327
19	Term structure of interest rates	349
20	Expected returns in the time series and cross section	389
21	Equity premium puzzle and consumption-based models	455
App. A.1	Brownian motion	489
App. A.2	Diffusion model	491
App. A.3	Ito's lemma	494