Ethical Orientation in Banks - Original Roots in Bank Governance and Current Challenges

Over the past 30 years, the banking sector has been characterized by increasing attention to ethics, which intensified as a consequence of the global financial crisis. Banks have the privilege and responsibility of directly interacting with a wide and diversified clientele and are supposed to base their long-lasting relationship with this clientele on trust, transparency, and proper behavior. Special types of banks, “alternative” to traditional banks in what they consider ethical behavior, have been increasingly present in the market. While alternative banks still cover a limited market share in terms of intermediated funds, awareness on their values and operational choices has been spreading throughout the financial community. The concept of social impact finance, currently permeating the financial sector, is a product of such a process. One interesting question, therefore, emerges: are these banks truly special and clearly distinguished from traditional banking? A second concern focuses on the role that these banks may play in the financial system due to a more intense ethical orientation. To answer these questions, it is necessary to outline a suitable analytical framework. Differently from the common approach, which is purely based on banks’ investment choices, this contribution draws from some cornerstone work on ethical business and is enriched by the original view of a classical author of the Italian business economics academic community. The resulting holistic approach bases banks’ ethical orientation on the institutional nature of financial intermediaries, their ultimate strategic goals, and their role in the economy and in society. To make the analysis more concrete, the suggested theoretical framework is used to study two types of banks that are commonly considered particularly ethically oriented: cooperative and alternative banks. It emerges that a small size may be critical in facilitating the achievement of a high degree of ethical orientation. The conclusions drawn based on these cases are used to offer some critical perspectives on the role of ethics in the current overall banking system

Seasonal Variation in the Fate of Seeds under Contrasting Logging Regimes

Seed predators and dispersers may drive the speed and structure of forest regeneration in natural ecosystems. Rodents and ants prey upon and disperse seeds, yet empirical studies on the magnitude of these effects are lacking. Here, we examined the role of ants and rodents on seed predation in 4 plant species in a successional gradient on a tropical rainforest island. We found that (1) seeds are mostly consumed rather than dispersed; (2) rates of seed predation vary by habitat, season, and species; (3) seed size, shape, and hardness do not affect the probability of being depredated. Rodents were responsible for 70% of seed predation and were negligible (0.14%) seed dispersers, whereas ants were responsible for only 2% of seed predation and for no dispersal. We detected seasonal and habitat effects on seed loss, with higher seed predation occurring during the wet season and in old-growth forests. In the absence of predators regulating seed-consumer populations, the densities of these resilient animals explode to the detriment of natural regeneration and may reduce diversity and carrying capacity for consumers and eventually lead to ecological meltdown

Search for pair production of scalar leptoquarks decaying into first- or second-generation leptons and top quarks in proton–proton collisions at s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract: A search for pair production of scalar leptoquarks, each decaying into either an electron or a muon and a top quark, is presented. This is the first leptoquark search using ATLAS data to investigate top-philic cross-generational couplings that could provide explanations for recently observed anomalies in B meson decays. This analysis targets high leptoquark masses which cause the decay products of each resultant top quark to be contained within a single high-pT large-radius jet. The full Run 2 dataset is exploited, consisting of 139fb-1 of data collected from proton–proton collisions at s=13TeV from 2015 to 2018 with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In the absence of any significant deviation from the background expectation, lower limits on the leptoquark masses are set at 1480GeV and 1470GeV for the electron and muon channel, respectively