26729 research outputs found
Sort by
Climate change and bank risk management
No full textBanks are reacting to accelerating climate change initiatives, where regulators (including the US, UK and Europe) are providing stimulus. It is becoming incumbent on banks to address climate change risk from a multi-dimensional perspective, encompassing policy on climate change risk management, a strategy incorporating this policy, a tactical approach to implementation, customer origination approach, balance sheet risk management approach, and regulatory compliance. This paper seeks to explore, based on practical experience, how climate change risk should be embedded into bank risk management.
Banks face an obligation to state and follow a Board-level approved Climate Change Risk policy. Drivers of this include: i) regulatory compliance: supervisors have pronounced on this so banks must comply with published guidelines; ii) market expectations: a growing majority of customers, shareholders and other external stakeholders are aligned with climate change and expect their bank to be proactive in this area; iii) business opportunity: there are growth and RoC-related benefits to adapting existing and/or implementing new products and services that address the global economy’s shift to more environmentally friendly business.
From a practical management-level and operational perspective, the imperative is to assess, understand and apply what this means for a bank’s risk management framework (RMF). Impacts are to be expected in the areas of governance, risk management, scenario analysis and stress testing and disclosure.
In theory at least, virtually all risk disciplines are impacted by climate change risk, including market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, and reputational risk. There are several elements to be addressed in an effective climate change risk approach embedded in a bank’s RMF: risk strategy, risk governance and frameworks, risk policies and standards, risk assessment and identification, risk measurement, appetite and limits, identifying and executing strategies, specific pricing for climate risk and climate related loan and deposit products, monitoring exposures, and reviewing and measuring performance
Uncovering trends in human trafficking and migrant smuggling activities: a natural language processing approach to UNODC SHERLOC database
No full textHuman trafficking affects every country of the world and it often occurs from less to more developed countries, where people are rendered vulnerable to trafficking by virtue of poverty, conflict or other conditions. A similar trend in human mobility is identified in migrant smuggling activities, which by definition differs in that it involves the procurement, in order to obtain a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state without however implementing the component of exploitation. However, when cases are manifested, these two issues have often been addressed through interchangeable legal frameworks depending on the country, the individual case and the political context.
In this project we bring together 2,284 collected case summaries of judicial decisions categorised either as human trafficking (n= 1490) or migrant smuggling cases (n= 755) or both from 133 different countries, as indexed in the UNODC SHERLOC database, in order to explore similarities and differences in the prevalent criminal activities while also focusing on the countries geographical position and demography. The goal is to identify whether there is (or not) a trend in the manifestation of the involved criminal activities. The research pioneers the incorporation of methodological steps which include Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify topics in the mined text (topic modelling) on the UNODC SHERLOC’s Case Law Database. We further identify and codify topics on the provided Fact Summaries (descriptions of the legal cases) in order to examine prevalence of criminal activities for each case and across countries
Migrant workers navigating the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK: resilience, reworking and resistance
Get PDFDrawing on qualitative data, we apply Katz’s conceptual framework of agency as resilience, reworking and resistance practices to theorise UK migrant workers’ responses to worsened employment conditions, stress of unemployment and reduced incomes during the pandemic. We draw attention to the range of micro practices they adopted to survive and rework existing conditions to their advantage - actions which rarely feature in academic writing, yet which recognise those who do not ‘resist’ as conscious agents who exercise power. Meanwhile, although outright oppositional responses to deteriorating employment conditions are rare, we demonstrate the nature of workplace union representation as a central factor in resisting managerial control. We extend Katz’s framework by considering the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind migrant workers’ responses, to understand better their dynamic choices of resilience, reworking and resistance practices in the chaotic circumstances of the pandemic
The role of the university entrepreneurial ecosystem in entrepreneurial finance: case studies of UK innovation knowledge centres
Get PDFHow to commercialize university research and create positive socio-economic impact is a fundamental research question that is under explored. Considerable public funds are invested in universities globally to create knowledge and then to explore its viability to exploit commercial value through supporting entrepreneurship. We explore how publicly funded research and commercialization of projects promote university’s science and technology (S&T) initiatives. Qualitative case studies, involving 45 interviews, examine three UK government-funded Innovation Knowledge Centres’ (IKCs) roles in commercializing three different emerging disruptive technologies: cyber security, digital construction and synthetic biology. An improved entrepreneurial finance (“entfin”) ecosystem is the catalyst to promote innovation, through public funds to empower industry and deliver an effective finance escalator. A “WHO” policy analysis framework examines: the “Why” rationale for public investment; “How” process of translation; and “Outcomes”. This identified how Entrepreneurial Finance combined with Intermediaries, Infrastructure, Training and Leadership impacts scientific research commercialization. We reveal several inter connectors that link maturity of projects, their locality and outcome horizons. Universities play an important intermediary role, regionally and globally to connect the wider entfin ecosystems. The conclusions suggest that government needs to improve the policy mix across university ecosystem actors to improve long horizon investment
The Art of Engagement: creating foundations for an international learning community in social practice
No full textSocial practice is a growing phenomenon amongst artists globally, who are increasingly drawing on their creativity to address urgent intersectional issues of social and environmental justice. There are nevertheless still relatively few opportunities to formally develop the knowledge and understanding needed for effective practice in this field. The nature of learning for engagement in the wider social sphere inherently questions whether it could be more effectively achieved by drawing on a wider pool of experience than higher education institutions in the UK have to offer.
The Art of Engagement was an AHRC funded networking project that took place over a year from April 2022 to explore how the teaching of social practice could be improved for arts practitioners through partnership between cultural and higher education institutions as well as collaboration across national boundaries. This was investigated via a collaboration between Middlesex University and the Tate Gallery in partnership with Queens Museum and City University of New York, drawing on the specific experience of each institution in its support or education for social engagement in art
Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables
The association of food ingredients in breakfast cereal products and fumonisins production: risks identification and predictions
Get PDFBreakfast processed products are remarkably at risk of fungal contamination. This research surveyed the fumonisins concentration in different breakfast products, and carried out in-vitro experiments measuring fumonisins content in different substrates inoculated with Fusarium verticillioides. The pipeline started with the identification of combinations of ingredients for 58 breakfast products. Twenty-three core ingredients, seven nutritional components and production types were analyzed using a Pearson correlation, k-means clustering and principal component analysis to show that no single factor is responsible for high fumonisins detection in processed cereals products. Consequently, decision tree regression was used as a means of determining and visualizing complex logical interactions between the same factors. We clustered the association of ingredients in low, medium, and high risk of fumonisin detection. The analysis showed that high fumonisins concentration is associated with those products that have high maize concentrations coupled especially with high sodium or rice. In a in-vitro experiment, different media were prepared by mixing the ingredients in the proportion found in the first survey and by measuring fumonisins production by Fusarium verticillioides. Results showed that: 1) fumonisins production by F. verticillioides is boosted by the synergistic effect of maize and highly ready carbohydrate content such as white flour; 2) a combination of maize >26%(w/w), rice >2.5%(w/w), NaCl >2.2%(w/w) led to high fumonisins production, while mono-ingredient products were more protective against fumonisins production. The observations in the in-vitro experiments appeared to align with the decision tree model that an increase in ingredient complexity can lead to fumonisins production by Fusarium. However, more research is urgently needed to develop the area of predictive mycology based on the association of processing, ingredients, fungal development, and mycotoxins production
Bulgaria’s election spiral: the anatomy of disappointment
Get PDFBulgaria still appears to be mired in a never-ending cycle of elections. Often characterised by overt corruption and backroom deals, the country’s political system is still being manipulated by long-term autocrat Boyko Borissov and his circle. This will prove important as political elites once again attempt to form a functioning government
Heroes or villains? Migrant essential workers and combined hostilities of Covid-19 and Brexit
Get PDFVillainised in populist discourses, migrant workers - especially those doing essential work - gained some positive attention in the context of Covid-19. Considered to be heroes and being clapped for weekly has however been short-lived against the increasingly hostile immigration politics of the UK. How have the combined hostilities of Brexit and the pandemic affected migrant workers from Eastern Europe? Were they heroes just for one day? We look at the case of Poles who constitute one of the UK’s largest foreign-born populations