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We develop an algorithm for solving a large class of nonlinear high-dimensional continuous-time models in finance. We approximate value and policy functions using deep learning and show that a combination of automatic differentiation and Ito's lemma allows for the computation of exact expectations, resulting in a negligible computational cost that is independent of the number of state variables. We illustrate the applicability of our method to problems in asset pricing, corporate finance, and portfolio choice and show that the ability to solve high-dimensional problems allows us to derive new economic insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the computational reproducibility of more than 1,000 empirical answers to 6 research questions in finance provided by 168 research teams. Running the researchers' code on the same raw data regenerates exactly the same results only 52% of the time. Reproducibility is higher for researchers with better coding skills and those exerting more effort. It is lower for more technical research questions, more complex code, and results lying in the tails of the distribution. Researchers exhibit overconfidence when assessing the reproducibility of their own research. We provide guidelines for finance researchers and discuss implementable reproducibility policies for academic journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies international reserves’ nominal exchange rate stabilizing impact in emerging markets and developing countries, with a particular focus on its nonlinearity and asymmetry across different states of the economy. Using the fixed-effects and dynamic panel threshold models, we find the reserves to short-term debt threshold ratio after which the marginal stabilizing effect of reserves begins to fall during tranquil times. Such diminishing returns, however, do not appear to exist even at the excessive level of reserves during the global financial crisis, partly justifying precautionary demand for international reserves. These results call for extending reserve pooling or swap arrangements to enhance efficiency of reserve management by holding adequate, rather than excess, international reserves with an access to emergency lending during the crisis.

We demonstrate the benefits of merging traditional hypothesis-driven research with new methods from machine learning that enable high-dimensional inference. Because the literature on post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is characterized by a "zoo" of explanations, limited academic consensus on model design, and reliance on massive data, it will serve as a leading example to demonstrate the challenges of high-dimensional analysis. We identify a small set of variables associated with momentum, liquidity, and limited arbitrage that explain PEAD directly and consistently, and the framework can be applied broadly in finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important literature emphasizes that finance grew rapidly after WWII relative to the full economy and the services sector, but these are poor benchmarks because they mask a broad structural shift from low- to high-skill services. We show that i) finance is among the most skill-intensive service industries, ii) the evolution of the finance income share closely tracks other high-skill service industries, and iii) finance grew much slower than the rest of high-skill services in the post-WWII period. The rise of modern finance is not as remarkable as prior research suggests, providing context for debates about the size of finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the impact of the refinancing channel of monetary policy on very small and medium-sized businesses. Using data covering the near universe of these businesses, we find that increased household refinancing reduces the probability that a business exits or exhausts its debt capacity in the calendar year, as well as 6 years after the first exposure. It also helps younger businesses maintain credit relationships. Financial factors, like business liquidity, as well as local demand dependence, amplify these effects, especially for very small businesses. These results suggest that the refinancing channel of monetary policy can have large long-run effects on local economies. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: All‐cash homebuyers account for one‐third of U.S. home purchases between 1980 and 2017. We use multiple data sets and research designs to robustly estimate that mortgaged buyers pay an 11% premium over all‐cash buyers to compensate home sellers for mortgage transaction frictions. A dynamic, representative‐seller model implies only a 3% premium, which would suggest an 8% puzzle. Accounting for heterogeneity in selling conditions explains half of this difference, but a puzzle holds in conditions with high transaction risk. An experimental survey of U.S. homeowners replicates these patterns and suggests that belief distortions can explain the puzzle in these high‐risk states.

This article examines the complex relationship between investment visas and tax residency within the context of increasing global mobility. As cross-border investments and the movement of high-net-worth individuals continue to grow, the process of determining tax residency has become more complicated and nuanced. The study investigates how countries use investment visa programs as strategic tools to attract capital, often by offering favorable tax regimes that blur traditional tax jurisdictional boundaries. While these programs are effective in drawing economic resources, they also raise ethical concerns and create opportunities for tax avoidance, thereby challenging the integrity of global tax systems. By analyzing current legal frameworks, the article seeks to clarify the complexities of tax residency in today's world. It addresses the challenges arising from the intersection of investment-driven immigration and tax law, emphasizing the difficulties in establishing clear tax obligations and residency status when individuals and their assets are dispersed across multiple juri sdictions. The ethical issues associated with these investment programs are also scrutinized, particularly the commercialization of citizenship and the risks of facilitating tax evasion. The article calls for a reevaluation of existing tax residency criteria, advocating for updates that reflect the realities of global mobility while ensuring legal certainty and fairness. Ultimately, the conclusions highlight the need for a more cohesive international framework to address the challenges and opportunities arising from the dynamic interplay between investment visas and tax residency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Amid growing concerns about social mobility in Britain's higher education system, our study delves into universities' role in addressing the social gap within the financial and professional services sectors. The social reproduction theory underscores how upper‐class students often benefit from greater exposure to dominant cultural and educational practices, providing them with a competitive advantage in navigating the higher education landscape. To combat these challenges, Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have invested heavily in Employability Development Opportunities (EDOs). Drawing on primary data from finance and accounting students and employability officers at one of these HEIs, our research aims to investigate which EDOs are perceived as most relevant for students to succeed in the financial and professional services industry. First, we confirm that both work experience and real‐life activities are most valuable and unavoidable, prompting business schools to include compulsory exposure to the finance industry as part of the curriculum. Second, we find that career development activities are useful as a starting point but not enough for students to secure an internship. Finally, while previous literature shows that extra‐curricular activities do not significantly impact student employability, we argue that some of these activities, for example, the Finance Society, are as valuable as real‐world exposure. Indeed, the Finance Society was found to be the most helpful source of information, advice and networking for finance students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relentless devastating impacts of global warming and other climate change effects leading to incessant ecological damages have compelled governments across the globe to rethink the pattern of natural resource depletion. This has motivated policymakers, governments, international organizations, and research pundits alike to advocate for a transition to sustainable consumption and production of natural resources. Consequently, there is a growing call for sustainable production and consumption practices, as outlined in Sustainable Development Goal 12 (SDG‐12). This research probes how natural resource production and consumption facilitate or hinder environmental sustainability in G7 economies from 1996 to 2020. The empirical evidence incorporates green energy, green technology, green finance, environmental tax, financial development, economic growth, and population as control variables within the STIRPAT theoretical framework. Second‐generation estimating techniques are utilized for empirical verification. An outstanding contribution of this study among others is the estimation of the moderating effects of green energy in mitigating the ensuing impact of natural resources on environmental sustainability. The results indicate that both production and consumption of natural resources, particularly coal and oil negatively affect environmental sustainability. Furthermore, green technology, energy, and finance as well as environmental tax are found to play a crucial role in promoting environmental sustainability. Green technology plays significant part in subduing the deteriorating effects of natural resources on the ecosystem. The robustness analyses further buttress the main analyses. Policy recommendations are proposed based on the empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political risk forecasting is an industry that provides specialized analysis to a range of clients, including insurance companies, extractive industries, governments, defense ministries, and NGOs. Risk forecasters aim to help their clients mitigate risks by anticipating political developments that could threaten their investments and assets, especially in the "emerging markets" of the Global South. What can ethnographic analysis reveal about this industry's knowledge practices and how it transforms open‐source intelligence into commercially relevant risk forecasts? Based on five years of work experience as Senior Africa Analyst at a commercial intelligence firm, I examine how forecasters select and process risk‐relevant events, narrate them as qualitative risk briefs, and finally assign them quantitative risk scores. Through a close reading of a risk firm's internal guidelines and its daily practices, I show how analysts construct risk in African countries in line with entrenched sociopolitical imaginaries, reproducing the coloniality of finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While machine learning's role in financial trading has advanced considerably, algorithmic transparency and explainability challenges still exist. This research enriches prior studies focused on high‐frequency financial data prediction by introducing an explainable reinforcement learning model for portfolio management. This model transcends basic asset prediction, formulating concrete, actionable trading strategies. The methodology is applied in a custom trading environment mimicking the CAC‐40 index's financial conditions, allowing the model to adapt dynamically to market changes based on iterative learning from historical data. Empirical findings reveal that the model outperforms an equally weighted portfolio in out‐of‐sample tests. The study offers a dual contribution: it elevates algorithmic planning while significantly boosting transparency and interpretability in financial machine learning. This approach tackles the enduring 'black‐box' issue and provides a holistic, transparent framework for managing investment portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to identify the intricate connections arising from finance and governance to water, food, and energy, utilizing data from 2000 to 2021 for eight South Asian countries. To address cross‐sectional dependence and panel heterogeneity, this study applied an augmented mean group (AMG) approach to discover long‐term connections across the chosen indicators. The estimators' outcome shows interconnectedness across water, food, and energy (WFE) resources, showing that water promotes food and energy, and food promotes water and energy. In contrast, energy fosters food production and reduces water availability. Further, governance positively influences food production (0.434%), water (0.044%), and energy consumption (0.142%). Likewise, finance positively and significantly responds to WFE consumption. Our results highlighted that governance unilaterally influences energy dynamics while bidirectional causal links emerge between finance, food, and energy. The obtained outcomes are re‐validated with feasible generalized least square (FGLS) and Driscoll and Kraay (DK) estimators. Ultimately, our study offers valuable insights for shaping economic, environmental, and food and water security policies in the region and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economics of health care and payment policy are complex and continually evolving. Breast imaging radiologists may not feel equipped to understand the financial aspect of their practice, but this is a critical competency from residency to senior leadership, especially for breast imaging radiologists. From conducting effective negotiations for new equipment as technology evolves to understanding how insurance benefit design affects patient access to care, breast imaging radiologists need to grasp the financial structures that underpins their practice. Fortunately, resources exist that are appropriate for each career stage, and this article directs the breast imaging radiologist to those resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improving forecasts of stock market indexes by considering common stock prices as hierarchical time series, combining clustering with forecast reconciliation. We propose grouping the individual stock price series in various ways including via metadata and using unsupervised learning techniques. The proposed approach is applied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index and the Standard & Poor 500 Index and their component stocks, and the results obtained with different grouping approaches are compared. The results empirically demonstrate that the combined use of clustering and reconciliation improves the forecast accuracy of the stock market indexes and their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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With much of the literature declaring little role for financial systems in boosting a nation's share of innovative entrepreneurs, this study argues that financial systems play an important role when other parts of the national business systems —skills and government— are weak. This argument is supported by an analysis of a panel data set comprising 283 country-year data over five years. Overall, this research contributes to a stream of research about the context for entrepreneurial aspirations or entrepreneurship quality. The study empirically confirms an idea seldom tested: the interplay required between systems components, such as institutions, to increase national innovative capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractBetween the 1880s and 1950s, national mortgage markets were created in the United States and Canada. The formative role of institutions and federal governments are well understood. Personal (individual or ‘private’) lenders have been omitted from the narrative although, in the late 1940s, they still provided a quarter of residential mortgages in the United States and two fifths in Canada. Rarely targeted, they were collateral damage, especially, of state initiatives. The distinctive nature of mortgages, secured on real estate, made the creation of national markets difficult. The character of personal loans – local, non-standard, non-amortized, and often informal -- made their assimilation into any supra-local market especially challenging. Their significance declined in waves: the 1900s, 1920s, and then, under government influence, after 1945. They persist in the reduced gaps left by institutions. We should pay them more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the role of internal audit practices in promoting operational compliance within public sector organizations, with a focus on Addis Ababa Housing Development Corporation. Internal audit is essential in ensuring compliance with policies, laws, and regulations, contributing to the overall effectiveness and governance of organizations. The study examines key internal audit practices such as audit frequency, auditor independence, auditor competency, and audit reporting. A quantitative approach was employed, utilizing structured questionnaires distributed to finance managers, internal auditors, and senior accountants. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics to determine the impact of internal audit practices on operational compliance. he results show that all the studied audit factors positively contribute to enhancing compliance. Auditor independence had the most significant influence, followed by auditor competency, audit frequency, and audit reporting. This highlights the necessity of frequent audits, unbiased auditor reporting, and specialized skills to ensure adherence to operational regulations. These findings emphasize the importance of strengthening internal audit practices in Ethiopia's public sector to improve governance and mitigate organizational risks. The study provides insights into improving audit practices, especially in resourceconstrained environments like Ethiopia, and underscores the need for continued investment in auditor training and independent reporting mechanisms to safeguard organizational integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health policies are decisions and practices that shape the accessibility of individuals to health services and the quality and financing of these services. These policies define the mode of delivery of health services, who will provide these services and how they will be financed. Proposals on Public Health Policies have been updated from the past to the present. This study aims to evaluate the suggestions of Dr Milaslı İsmail Hakkı, who has many works in the fields of language, religion and medicine, who has been among the scientists who have transferred his suggestions for the benefit of all humanity and included these suggestions in his ongoing studies until today, about public health policies. The study was subjected to content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods. Document analysis was conducted in order to evaluate the research. In this context, Dr Milaslı İsmail Hakkı's medical works were examined, and his suggestions on Public Health Policies were evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is creating an "accelerator state" through a multi-layered system to identify and fast track the growth of high-tech SMEs in strategic sectors. Certified high-tech SMEs enjoy unique advantages, most notably privileged access to public and private financing. An analysis of the "Little Giants" program—a central feature of the accelerator state—proves that selected firms are indeed benefiting from enhanced financing. The study also reveals flaws in its selection process. The implications for foreign actors are significant. The accelerator state aims to replace imports in key value chains, which poses a direct challenge to foreign firms. The blurred lines between state support and market forces in the scheme also make it more difficult for foreign governments to track distortionary practices and enforce fair competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, one in three students are now enrolled in private higher education institutions (PHEIs), with the total reaching almost 70 million enrolments. This pattern is similar across a highly diverse Asia: more than 35% of students are enrolled in the private sector, and around 60% of higher education institutions (usually much smaller than their public counterparts) are private. But in East Asia, a combination of high participation rates and a rapidly ageing demographic has led to a complex, developing crisis, particularly in a much‐expanded private sector. Adding to the existing suite of problems – finance, over‐supply, declining standards, regulatory issues, and in some cases, corruption – the combined effect of recent COVID disruptions, regional economic reversals, and a rapidly ageing demographic has intensified existing problems, constituting a major crisis for the sector, especially more marginal private institutions. The analysis charts the various responses of governments in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, draws out some of the limits to reform, and poses the dilemma for the future of private higher education in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finance has been the most important aspect of people's lives for making small to large decisions in life. Finances affect our ability to invest in opportunities, save for uncertain future events, and purchase necessities. In addition, money has a significant impact on reducing poverty, creating jobs, and advancing society. On the other side, deep learning is a growing field as it is transforming and revolutionizing various areas and industries. While realising the importance of both finance and deep learning in our lives for better decision-making, our study aims to find the connectedness between both so that understanding this relation and utilising it will create better systems for optimal decision-making and also to study its influence on the stock market, presenting various challenges and opportunities regarding this matter and unleashing the potential that comes with the advanced technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public–Private Partnerships (PPP) are long-term agreements for procuring public projects that bundle up design, build, finance, operation and management. The UK's version, Project Finance Initiative, was a policy-based framework, now defunct. Instead, PPPs in Caribbean British Overseas Territories (BOTs) are based on rigid models, with early stopovers focused on ensuring financial sustainability. A comparative analysis among Caribbean BOTs concludes that they show common models, and that those BOTs that need PPPs the most have set up the biggest hurdles to get them started. The analysis comprises four features: legal sources, administrative safeguards, scope restrictions for sector and value, and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information disclosure policies influence nearly every consumer domain. Disclosure research across various sectors, particularly finance and nutrition, demonstrates how policymakers can enhance consumer decision-making and promote a fair marketplace. In particular, five key considerations make policies more effective: understanding existing consumer preferences, capturing and maintaining consumer attention, providing actionable knowledge, anticipating firm responses, and recognizing potential perverse effects of information provision. An overarching "theory of change" organizes these considerations and other steps to reveal how disclosure policy can promote consumer well-being. Implementing disclosure policies using these psychological and behavioral insights will maximize their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the complex dynamics of reproductive labor beyond traditional domestic spaces. Topics include Matthiesen's exploration of how increasing inequality; the impact of violent systems, such as mass incarceration and for-profit healthcare, on the forms of reproductive exploitation that arise outside the home; and the role of lesbian and queer family-making as a significant exception within this history,.

The article explores the concept of home as a site of revolutionary potential within the context of disability politics and housing crises. Topics include the definition of home as a practice of collaborative survival and freedom; the impact of the Reagan administration's policies on public housing, highlighting the stark reversal of funding from housing to prisons; and the ways in which disabled activists engage with the paradox of home.

Biodiversity loss, driven by human activities, significantly affects the environment, human societies, and economies. Using the extended multi‐regional input–output (EEMRIO) and life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques, we offer insights into how these methodologies can be used to inform financial decisions related to biodiversity focusing on two key aspects: biodiversity impacts and ecosystem service dependencies. Our method combines spatially explicit characterization factors from LC‐IMPACT with the Global Resource Input‐Output Assesment (GLORIA) database to estimate biodiversity impacts. As a case study we assess the biodiversity impact of the MSCI All Country World Index (MSCI ACWI) which consist of about 3000 large‐ and mid‐sized companies, from 23 developed and 24 emerging countries. The results demonstrate that most of the biodiversity impact is caused in the Americas, followed by Asia, despite its low representation in the index's country weight (6%). Europe shows the least impact. These results emphasize the need to account for global supply chain linkages as products sold in one country might have significant biodiversity impacts elsewhere due to sourcing of production inputs. Second, our results identify the main determinants of the index's impact: land use, followed by water stress and climate change. Although most of the impact is localized in few sectors, the distinct characteristics of these sectors require industry‐specific mitigation approaches. Finally, double materiality results show both, the influence companies have on biodiversity and the reciprocal effects. Companies neglecting these impacts risk financial setbacks, making it a crucial concern for investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The histories of finance and music are more interconnected than they might at first appear. From ancient ideas on the mathematical harmony of the universe to ultra-contemporary approaches driven by networked data, the flow of sounds and the circulation of capital have long traced one another's shadow. Indeed, since the publication of Jacques Attali's Noise in 1977, musicologists and sound scholars have been probing how music as an expression of mathematical knowledge has intersected with a range of intellectual, social, and economic shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several theories in economics and finance suggest that risk attitudes play a vital role in economic choices, including being an entrepreneur and the choice of finance for businesses. However, there are limited empirical tests of these theories in the African context, where majority of firms are small and medium-scale enterprises. Using the 7th round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 7), this study estimates the effect of risk attitudes on the decision to own a household enterprise and the choice of finance by owners of household enterprises. The study finds no significant impact of risk aversion on household enterprise ownership. We find risk aversion to significantly influence the use of self-financing as start-up capital; however, after controlling for access to finance, this effect reduces. We also did not find a significant relationship between risk aversion and the use of loan financing as working capital. The findings from this study shed light on the risk management strategy of household enterprise owners and suggest that access to finance is an important determinant of sources of financing. Hence, to spur growth of these critical household enterprises, the essential role of access to finance should be addressed by policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alphonse Desjardins, a devout Quebecois Catholic, established North America's first cooperative bank in 1900. The first English-language attempt to grapple with Desjardins' faith, this article is an important addition to the many new studies of North American Christians and economics in Desjardins' period, nearly all of which focus on Protestants. More particularly, it contributes to this historical conversation through conceptual models drawn from anthropologies of religion related to sacrifice, credibility, and monetary circulation. Ultimately, this case study prompts us to ask anew: how do people of faith shape, and redefine, capitalist structures? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial technologies or 'fintech'—an array of digital technologies ranging from mobile banking and digital payment systems to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies—are heralded for solving problems of access to financial products and services and improving people's participation in the economy. However, we contend that fintech is an invasive infrastructure by learning from Indigenous theorizing of oil and gas pipelines alongside concepts of predatory inclusion and obfuscation. We use critical discourse analysis to study finance, technology and social media companies' language over nearly three decades of newswires and press releases that promote new retail financial products and services. We develop themes of new products old promises , benevolent exploitation , efficient obfuscation and information extraction. Similar to oil and gas pipelines within the project of settler colonialism, our findings show how fintech operates as invasive infrastructure by serving as a key link for connecting oppressed and marginalized peoples to companies for predation and extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines the direct impact of solar events on the financial sector of the United States, while also investigating their indirect effects on other sectors of the US economy. The study introduces a cutting-edge methodology based on the Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model, utilizing a comprehensive dataset, to estimate indirect global impulse response functions. By putting forward this approach, the study highlights the significant contribution of solar events on financial and insurance activities, establishing a clear connection to the broader US economy. Moreover, it quantifies and demonstrates the direct and indirect influence of solar events on the US economy, paving the way for future in-depth investigations in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research in entrepreneurship reveals that financial resource acquisition for student entrepreneurs is constrained by several factors including a lack of experience, domain expertise and underdeveloped social networks. What follows are accentuated risks of failure that can discourage students from entering the entrepreneurial career pathway. To attenuate resource shortcomings and information asymmetries, student entrepreneurs can signal their underlying qualities to other entrepreneurial actors through informational cues. These signals are embedded in the norms and rules of a specific context; however, much of the research related to signals has been devoid of contextual understanding. Building on the notion that signals do not operate in a vacuum, our attention in the present work is directed from an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective and the impact this specific context can have on signal generation and interpretation. We build our contribution by extending signaling theory via a multiple case study of eight student entrepreneurs operating in an emerging privately governed entrepreneurial ecosystem located in Valencia, Spain. We contextualize four pathways that students followed towards entrepreneurial financing, creating four student entrepreneur profiles. Several useful contributions to the study of student entrepreneurship, signaling theory, and entrepreneurial ecosystem theory are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarises standard film financing practices for the production and distribution of new content over the past 30 years using a mixed-methods approach. It takes the U.S. movie industry as a case in point to study how excess risk and uncertainty in the financing of new projects are processed and managed by private-sector, entities as well as what market-based solutions have been developed to prevent market failure. The research has wide-ranging implications for other creative industries and their use of intangible assets in creative content finance. In particular, it discusses the prominent role of intellectual property rights in financial transactions in the U.S. audiovisual sector and the ability of the industry to leverage funds through the strategic use of its IP assets. The research findings are based on a series of semi-structured interviews, commissioned expert memoranda, and a dedicated panel of selected industry experts. In addition, using novel data from Uniform Commercial Code filings and official IP registers, we conduct exploratory analysis and provide descriptive evidence on the use of credit and intangible collateral as well as the industry diffusion of such practices. In light of the digital transformation of the industry, this research also documents industry trends and recent changes in U.S. film financing and provides an alternative explanation for the surge in new titles. Finally, we outline generic policy options for improving the financing environment for new films in the United States. The results could help to inform the larger debate on IP-backed finance and the strategic use of intangible assets in content industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorism financing poses a direct threat to South Africa's national security as well as the integrity and reputation of its financial system. Terrorism financing has the potential to finance and enable terrorist activities locally and abroad. Over and above posing a security threat, it also impacts the integrity of non-financial institutions such as charities and non-profit organizations which could be exploited, often unwittingly, for the financing of terrorism. Terrorist groups make use of multiple methods to raise move, store and/or use funds and exploit the inherent vulnerabilities of countries' regulatory, financial, law enforcement and security frameworks. Their techniques vary and depend on the sophistication and objectives of terrorists, terrorist organizations and their sympathizers. Terrorism financing investigations are usually extremely complex, particularly with regard to the identification of financiers and ultimate end-users of the generated funds. This is due to the myriad financial transaction mediums such as cash and crypto assets, the international nature of transfers between financial jurisdictions, the informal financial sector (e.g. Hawala), as well as the capacity and capability challenges faced by financial institutions, regulators, supervisory bodies and law enforcement agencies. Funds intended for terrorism related activities may be derived from legitimate as well as from illicit sources, making terrorism financing particularly difficult to detect, disrupt and prevent. The constant evolution of terrorism financing methods in response to new and increasingly sophisticated countermeasures remains a continual challenge locally and for international financial oversight bodies such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and its regional-style bodies. This paper will investigate and assess South Africa's vulnerability to terrorism financing and the counter-terrorist financing framework to effectively combat terrorism financing. The key issues to be appraised include an assessment of factors that contribute to SA's vulnerability to terrorism financing. A counter-terrorist financing framework adopted by SA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]