This edited conference volume provides a survey of scholarly and professional thinking about the state of financial innovations and innovators and their diffusion across national boundaries, as well as the welfare-enhancing implications for firms and nation-states. Like the engineering and practice of financial innovation itself, Financial Innovation and the Welfare of Nations is interdisciplinary and international in scope. Leading academics and professionals in economics, finance, strategic management, and law offer their latest thinking on: financial innovations and the dynamics of emerging capital markets; first-mover advantages and disadvantages with financial innovations; modelling banking deregulation and systemic risk; identifying blue-chip investments in frontier equity markets; piercing the sovereign ceiling with cross-border securitization; credit derivatives and economic restructuring; and insurance derivatives and the convergence of the banking and insurance industry.