Women's Interfaith Initiatives in the United States Post 9/11

In this post 9/11 era, women's interfaith initiatives offer an exciting alternative to the standard model for interfaith engagement, which often presumes male (clergy) leadership. For one thing, academic and professional authorities on interfaith relations are replaced with real-life experts: women who live and breathe the challenges of religious coexistence in times of crisis. Secondly, formal dialogue is replaced with storytelling. Personal testimonies, reflections, and engagement in difficult dialogues are not limited to theological arenas of overlap and divergence, but instead focus on the day to day experiences where conflicts of identity, more often than ideology, are commonplace.What follows is a sketch of the multi-religious women's networks of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, as well as a snapshot of women's initiatives that have developed in various parts of the United States over the past five years. The intention is to explore this new model of women's interfaith initiatives, with the idea that it is complementary to traditional models, and as such will be critical to multi-religious societies in the years to come. In the spirit of honoring these efforts, let me begin with a story

Risikomanagement in der Speditions- und Logistikbranche: Bestandsaufnahme zu Verbreitung und Reifegrad

Seit 2008 untersuchen die beiden Autoren regelmäßig den Stand des Risikomanagements in der Speditions- und Logistikbranche. Diese Untersuchungen werden mittels empirischer Erhebungen durchgeführt. Das vorliegende Discussion Paper dokumentiert die Ergebnisse der aktuellsten Erhebung aus dem Jahre 2015. Dabei weist die Studie unter anderem den Anwendungsgrad des Risikomanagements aus, die Verankerung in der Aufbauorganisation sowie die Nutzung von Methoden und IT-Anwendungen. Abschließend stellt sie den wahrgenommenen Nutzen des Risikomanagements für Logistikdienstleister dar.Since 2008, the authors regularly analyze the status of risk management in the forwarding and logistics industry. Those analyses are conducted using empirical surveys. The current discussion paper documents the results of the 2015 survey. The study shows the level of application of risk management, the implementation within the organizational structure, as well as the application of methods and IT tools. Finally, the study identifies the perceived benefits of risk management logistic service providers

Developing An Adaptive Resource Management Framework For Sustainable Cashmere Production In Mongolia

Cashmere is a multi-billion dollar commodity and recent increases in demand have led to the degradation of grassland and desert steppe ecosystems in East and Central Asia. Cashmere wool is a product of goats and 90% of the world’s supply originates from Mongolia and northern China. As global demand for cashmere increases, the consequences to the natural landscapes and people of the region may be severe, especially given the rapid rate of environmental change due to warming climatic conditions in the region. Textile manufacturers recognize the need for better goat herding practices and support the development of a sustainable cashmere certification program. While simple in concept, sustainable certification requires a clear set of goals and measurable attributes that define the various dimensions of sustainability. Any certification program also needs to account for ongoing landscape changes due to factors like climate change, infrastructure development, and livestock grazing. In Mongolia, several nonprofits, industry representatives, government officials, and herders have formed partnerships in separate areas of the country to develop systems for sustainable cashmere production. However, these projects are mostly operating independently from one another and there is no consensus among these groups about what sustainable cashmere livestock management actually entails. The goal of this study was to develop a framework for making decisions about the management of goats that maximize sustainable outcomes. The framework accounts for livestock impact on wildlife and habitat composition, two key components of ecological sustainability, and makes use of monitoring data to allow decisions to adapt to changing landscape conditions. The project occurred at Ikh Nart Nature Reserve, a study site in central Mongolia that characterizes many of the goat producing regions of the country. Objectives included: 1) defining rangeland management priorities by seeking input from key stakeholders, 2) developing models that quantify relationship of livestock with wildlife and habitats, and 3) constructing an adaptive management framework that integrates models and ongoing monitoring data to evaluate the ecological outcomes of different alternative livestock density decisions. Results from this study will provide a framework for informing livestock management decisions at a regional scale that maximize cashmere production and sustainable outcomes. The framework serves as a foundation that can be scaled-up to other parts of the country and possibly support larger-scale sustainable cashmere certification standards

The Golden Rule of Investing

Although gold is a volatile asset, it is often considered a safe haven that offers protection during bear markets. The authors study this safe-haven hypothesis by analyzing a strategic allocation to gold for a loss-averse investor with a one-year evaluation horizon. A modest allocation to gold indeed helps to reduce the downside risk of traditional stock–bond allocations, yet such risk reduction comes at the cost of return. Conversely, low-volatility stocks are more effective in reducing losses without giving up returns. As a result, a stock–bond–gold allocation considerably benefits from embracing low-volatility stocks and allows for increasing the equity allocation at the expense of bonds. Notably, the effectiveness of this defensive multi-asset portfolio increases with the investment horizon

Contributions to Applied International Business Management Research

The research papers published in this reader were presented to an audience of academicians and practitioners at the 2011 Global Business Management Research Conference at Fulda University. The conference was conducted under the topic “Recent Developments in Business Management Research in an International and Regional Context”

Muligheter og barrierer for økt anvendelse av norske belgvekster til humant konsum

I Norge er det i dag politiske målsetninger om å sikre høyere matproduksjon og øke konsumet av plantebaserte proteiner. Grunnet gode effekter i et vekstskifte møter erter og åkerbønner voksende interesse blant norske bønder. Norske belgvekster anvendes i dag i svært liten grad til menneskemat til tross for gode dyrkningsforutsetninger og økende etterspørsel. Dette er motivasjonen for oppgavens problemstilling: Hva er markedsmulighetene og barrierene for økt anvendelse av norske belgvekster som menneskemat? Gjennom en kvalitativ kartleggingsstudie ble den aktuelle verdikjeden for matproduksjon identifisert. Videre ble sentrale representanter fra aktørgruppene intervjuet for å besvare problemstillingen. For videre granskning av verdikjedens mekanismer har vi bidratt på arrangørsiden i en workshop med mål om å finne en felles plan for hvordan norske belgvekster skal bli en del av matsystemet. I oppgaven er produksjonsteori, etterspørselsteori og kontraktsteori anvendt for analyser knyttet til problemstillingen. Verdikjeden er preget av usikkerhet knyttet til både klimatiske begrensninger og etterspørsel. Norske erter og åkerbønner er ikke prismessig konkurransedyktige i forhold til importerte belgvekster. Her er aktørene avhengig av investeringsvilje for å oppskalere bruken av de norske belgvekstene, men dette innebærer ekstra risiko som få aktører er villige til å ta. Vi finner også at fleksibilitet og samarbeidsvilje på tvers av verdikjeden er viktig, og at risikofordeling er nødvendig for å sikre en høyere produksjon av norske belgvekster. Kontrakter er en måte å oppnå spredning av risiko, og kan bidra til insentiver og vilkår som stimulerer til å sikre en høyere produksjon av norske råvarer til matkvalitet. Industrien må samarbeide med dyrkerne og leverandører av støttefunksjoner for å utvikle felles kriterier for økt lønnsomhet i produksjon og foredling av belgvekster. Disse kriteriene vil påvirke sortsutvelgelse og utvikling av nye sorter som er bedre egnet for dyrking i Norge. Sammen med mer tilpasset dyrkningsteknikk for norske forhold er dette viktig for lønnsomheten gjennom hele verdikjeden

Multi-Asset Factor Investing Strategies and Controversy Screening using Natural Language Processing

Factor investing strategies have revolutionized the landscape of equity investing, and continues to be heavily researched by academics and practitioners, leading to the documentation of more than 450 factors. However, from a practical investment perspective, much of the factor evidence documented by academics may be more apparent than real. The performance of many factors has found to be dependent on the inclusion of small- and micro-cap stocks in academic studies, although such stocks would likely be excluded from the real investment universe due to illiquidity and transaction costs. We take the perspective of an institutional investor and navigate this zoo of factors by focusing on the evidence relevant to the practicalities of factor-based investment strategies. Establishing a sound theoretical rationale is key to identifying “true” factors, and we emphasize the need to recognize data-mining concerns that may cast doubt on the relevance of many factors. Nevertheless, a parsimonious set of factors emerges in equities and other asset classes, including currencies, fixed income and commodities. Since these factors can serve as meaningful ingredients to factor-based portfolio construction, we build currency factor strategies using the G10 currencies. We show that parametric portfolio policies can help guide an optimal currency strategy when tilting towards cross-sectional factor characteristics. While currency carry serves as the main return generator in this tilting strategy, momentum and value are implicit diversifiers to potentially balance the downside of carry investing in flight-to-quality shifts of foreign exchange investors. Drawing insights from a currency timing strategy, according to time series predictors, we further examine the parametric portfolio policy’s ability to mitigate the downside of the carry trade by incorporating an explicit currency factor timing element. This integrated approach to currency factor investing outperforms a naive equally weighted benchmark as well as univariate and multivariate parametric portfolio policies. Whilst factor investing continues to grow in popularity, investors have expressed interest in aligning their investments with social values in order to maximize positive social impact. Hence, for any company, involvement in socially unethical practices not only leads to reputational damage but also financial consequences, anecdotally. To quantify the consequence of such controversial behaviour, we investigate the price impact of involvement in social controversies and find that the returns drop, on an average, by over 200 basis in the days around the outbreak of news on social violations. We identify companies following socially unethical practices from news headlines with the help of state-of-the-art language modelling approaches. Using a large sample of 1 million news headlines, we further train and fine-tune a DistilRoBERTa model to identify reports of controversial incidents in daily news feed. We map the price reaction of such controversial events using an event study approach and document negative price impact for companies with poor social practices measured via increased controversial behaviour, largely driven by small to medium market capitalization companies. Amongst the eight different social dimensions we examine, controversies surrounding violations of product safety standards, online scams and data privacy breaches significantly impact firm returns. Dissecting this result by geographies, the U.S, Australia, Europe and Emerging Market react very negatively to social controversies

Factor Zoo (.zip)

The number of factors allegedly driving the cross-section of stock returns has grown steadily over time. We explore how much this “factor zoo” can be compressed, focusing on explaining the available alpha rather than the covariance matrix of factor returns. Our findings indicate that about 15 factors are enough to span the entire factor zoo. This evidence suggests that many factors are redundant but also that merely using a handful of factors, as in common asset pricing models, is insufficient. While the selected factor styles remain persistent, the specific style representatives vary over time, underscoring the importance of continuous factor innovation