Becoming (Un)Stable: Twenty Years of Financial Stability Governance at the Bank of England

This thesis is the first critical social scientific study of a central bank’s financial stability agenda, in this case the Bank of England. The study is broadly situated in a trajectory of research into geographies of money and finance that is concerned with global financial processes, opening up the black box of institutional practices and the interaction between discourse and the economy. More specifically, the thesis contributes a Deleuzian cultural economy and three key concepts as a means for interrogating the financial stability practices of the central bank in question: assemblage, performativity and (in)stability. The methodology of the thesis has involved creating a financial stability archive from some 2000 documents, texts and videos publically available on the Bank of England website. Texts within this archive were read in a consistent and rigorous way, drawing on a grounded theory approach that was ‘somewhere between abduction and deduction’ (Crang 2003: 132). And, finally, the empirical contribution of the thesis is concerned with financial stability techniques and develops across five chapters concerned, respectively, with press conferences, credit derivatives, Value-at Risk, stress testing and confidence

Understanding the functioning of urban climate finance through topologies of reach

Urban climate action is increasingly understood through the lens of finance: through financial agendas, interests, and practical tools which enable ‘bankable’ or profitable interventions. While the literature is rife with criticism of the normative foundations and exploitative effects of this approach, it fails to capture the variegated ways in which finance configures, and is configured by, particular urban sites and spaces of power. This contribution extends our cartography of urban climate finance by bringing to light the relational dynamics of financial practices and the ways in which they span across diverse urban sites in topological ways.It has now become a common refrain among development and finance institutions that urban climate finance is, in fact, difficult to realize. A central reason for this is the perceived lack of possibilities to generate returns for investors. A topological perspective offers a relational view on the spatial practices through which new places are to be enrolled into the use of climate finance with the aim of stabilizing financial investment. Concentrating on the notion of ‘topological reach’, we show how climate finance, through its particular demands for bankability, creates new urban presences through spatial mechanisms of stretches, folds and distortions. By examining these topological mechanisms across a breadth of empirical material sourced from the individual research of the coauthors, we unpack the ways in which climate finance strategies are extended by a limited set of actors across space, often dominating and instrumentalizing urban climate action imaginaries and practices, while also failing to address a wide range of concerns and communities which fall outside of the operational parameters and speculative horizons of finance.The topological perspective provides us with the tools to make these struggles visible and opens up avenues to contest contemporary climate finance practices on the ground and to decenter the overarching narratives that drive contemporary climate finance

Effect of fresh red blood cell transfusions on clinical outcomes in premature, very low-birth-weight infants: The ARIPI randomized trial

Context: Even though red blood cells (RBCs) are lifesaving in neonatal intensive care, transfusing older RBCs may result in higher rates of organ dysfunction, nosocomial infection, and length of hospital stay. Objective: To determine if RBCs stored for 7 days or less compared with usual standards decreased rates of major nosocomial infection and organ dysfunction in neonatal intensive care unit patients requiring at least 1 RBC transfusion. Design, Setting, and Participants: Double-blind, randomized controlled trial in 377 premature infants with birth weights less than 1250 g admitted to 6 Canadian tertiary neonatal intensive care units between May 2006 and June 2011. Intervention: Patients were randomly assigned to receive transfusion of RBCs stored 7 days or less (n=188) vs standard-issue RBCs in accordance with standard blood bank practice (n=189). Main Outcome Measures: The primary outcome was a composite measure of major neonatal morbidities, including necrotizing enterocolitis, retinopathy of prematurity, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, and intraventricular hemorrhage, as well as death. The primary outcome was measured within the entire period of neonatal intensive care unit stay up to 90 days after randomization. The rate of nosocomial infection was a secondary outcome. Results: The mean age of transfused blood was 5.1 (SD, 2.0) days in the fresh RBC group and 14.6 (SD, 8.3) days in the standard group. Among neonates in the fresh RBC group, 99 (52.7%) had the primary outcome compared with 100 (52.9%) in the standard RBC group (relative risk, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.82-1.21). The rate of clinically suspected infection in the fresh RBC group was 77.7% (n=146) compared with 77.2% (n=146) in the standard RBC group (relative risk, 1.01; 95% CI, 0.90-1.12), and the rate of positive cultures was 67.5% (n=127) in the fresh RBC group compared with 64.0% (n=121) in the standard RBC group (relative risk, 1.06; 95% CI, 0.91-1.22). Conclusion: In this trial, the use of fresh RBCs compared with standard blood bank practice did not improve outcomes in premature, very low-birth-weight infants requiring a transfusion. Trial Registration: clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00326924; Current Controlled Trials Identifier: ISRCTN65939658. ©2012 American Medical Association. All rights reserved

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Measurement of the Splitting Function in &ITpp &ITand Pb-Pb Collisions at root&ITsNN&IT=5.02 TeV

Data from heavy ion collisions suggest that the evolution of a parton shower is modified by interactions with the color charges in the dense partonic medium created in these collisions, but it is not known where in the shower evolution the modifications occur. The momentum ratio of the two leading partons, resolved as subjets, provides information about the parton shower evolution. This substructure observable, known as the splitting function, reflects the process of a parton splitting into two other partons and has been measured for jets with transverse momentum between 140 and 500 GeV, in pp and PbPb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV per nucleon pair. In central PbPb collisions, the splitting function indicates a more unbalanced momentum ratio, compared to peripheral PbPb and pp collisions.. The measurements are compared to various predictions from event generators and analytical calculations.Peer reviewe

Measurement of nuclear modification factors of gamma(1S)), gamma(2S), and gamma(3S) mesons in PbPb collisions at root s(NN)=5.02 TeV

The cross sections for ϒ(1S), ϒ(2S), and ϒ(3S) production in lead-lead (PbPb) and proton-proton (pp) collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV have been measured using the CMS detector at the LHC. The nuclear modification factors, RAA, derived from the PbPb-to-pp ratio of yields for each state, are studied as functions of meson rapidity and transverse momentum, as well as PbPb collision centrality. The yields of all three states are found to be significantly suppressed, and compatible with a sequential ordering of the suppression, RAA(ϒ(1S)) > RAA(ϒ(2S)) > RAA(ϒ(3S)). The suppression of ϒ(1S) is larger than that seen at √sNN = 2.76 TeV, although the two are compatible within uncertainties. The upper limit on the RAA of ϒ(3S) integrated over pT, rapidity and centrality is 0.096 at 95% confidence level, which is the strongest suppression observed for a quarkonium state in heavy ion collisions to date. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.Peer reviewe

Search for supersymmetry in events with one lepton and multiple jets in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe