Research in Finance

The current volume in the Research in Finance series features an international set of contributors. The overall theme of the volume is a timely topic capturing one of the leading issues of the year: coping with ‘‘systemic’’ risk.This chapter offers very interesting insights into the so-called systemic risks within global financial markets.In Chapter 3, a team of accounting professors and a finance professoroffer new evidence that traditional accounting ‘‘indicators’’ of impendingfinancial distress may not work well at predicting difficulties.The last three chapters have derivatives and stock market indices in common. In the closing chapter, we hear more about stock index products from Guanghua Cao (recent graduate of the doctoral program in applied mathematics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas), Andrew Chen (Distinguished Professor of Finance at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas), and Zhangxin Chen (Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada). They focus on variable annuities and equity-indexed annuities, which have embedded put and call options.