Moral imagination or heuristic toolbox? Events and the risk assessment of structured financial products in the financial bubble

The paper uses the example of the failure of bankers and financial managers to understand the risks of dealing in structured financial products, prior to the financial collapse, to investigate how people respond to crises. It focuses on whether crises cause people to challenge their habitual frames by the application of moral imagination. It is proposed that the structure of financial products and their markets triggered the use of heuristics that contributed to the underestimation of risks. It is further proposed that such framing heuristics are highly specialised to specific contexts, and are part of a wider set of heuristics that people carry in their cognitive ‘adaptive tool boxes’. Consequently, it is argued, when a crisis occurs the heuristics are not challenged, but are simply put away, and other more appropriate heuristics put to use until a sense of normality returns, and the use of the old heuristics is resumed

Organisational slack, corporate reputation and financial performance

This discussion paper aims to fill the gap left by the latest research on organisational slack that has been focused on emerging economies or on a single company or on a single industry. Senior executives’ perceptions that contribute to a measure of corporate reputation are tested as a proxy measure of unabsorbed slack. Disaggregating the components that make up reputation enables the perceptions of a company’s ‘ability to innovate’ and how efficiently they ‘use their corporate assets’ to also be tested as measures of unabsorbed, perceptual or discretionary slack. The impact of these variables is considered in terms of company performance

Risk management: understanding why is as important as understanding how

The management of risk is a key area within a number of ACCA papers, and exam questions related to this area are common. It is vital that students are able to apply risk management techniques, such as using derivative instruments to hedge against risk, and offer advice and recommendations as required by the scenario in the question. It is also equally important that students understand why corporations manage risk in theory and in practice, because risk management costs money but does it actually add more value to a corporation? This article explores the circumstances where the management of risk may lead to an increase in the value of a corporation

Measurements of the masses, lifetimes and mixings of B hadrons at the Tevatron

The Tevatron, with p p-bar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96TeV can produce all flavors of B hadrons and allows for unprecedented studies in the B physics sector. The CDF and D0 collaborations have more than 5 fb-1 of data recorded. I present here a selection of results on the masses, lifetimes and mixings of B hadrons using between 1.0 and 2.8fb-1 of data.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Proceedings for Recontres de Moriond QCD 2009, references adde

Measurements of the CKM angle gamma using B^+ --> D K^+ decays at LHCb

Of the three angles that make up the CKM matrix, the least well known is gamma. A precision measurement of this quantity is highly desirable as it forms one of the arbitrary parameters in the Standard Model. Moreover, this is the one angle of the CKM triangle that can be determined in channels that occur via tree-level decays. While loop-level processes could have sensitivity to physics beyond the standard model, tree level processes are expected to be unaltered. Hence a measurement of gamma in tree level processes leads to a standard model benchmark measurement against which other loop-driven measurements can be compared. The measurements described here are the latest developments from LHCb involving the decay B^+ --> D K^+, where the D meson is either a D^0 or a anti-D^0 and the final state of the D meson is accessible from either flavour state.Comment: Proceedings of the CKM 2012, the 7th International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle, University of Cincinnati, USA, 28th September - 2 October 201