An investigation of the corporate responsibility report assurance statements of the Big Four banks in Australia

The corporate responsibility report demonstrates an organisation’s commitment to sustainability. Currently, not much is known about the quality of the assurance statements of the corporate responsibility reports of banks in Australia. This research study fills the gap in the literature by investigating the corporate responsibility report assurance statements of the Big Four banks in Australia. The assurance statements are evaluated against the criteria provided by O’Dwyer and Owen (2005) and Perego and Kolk (2012). The results reveal that although the assurance statements, on average, meet the criteria highly, there are areas that need improvement. Keywords: assurance, bank, AA1000AS, ASAE 3000, ISAE 3000 JEL Codes:G21, M14, M4

Linking Light Scalar Modes with A Small Positive Cosmological Constant in String Theory

Based on the studies in Type IIB string theory phenomenology, we conjecture that a good fraction of the meta-stable de Sitter vacua in the cosmic stringy landscape tend to have a very small cosmological constant $\Lambda$ when compared to either the string scale $M_S$ or the Planck scale $M_P$, i.e., $\Lambda \ll M_S^4 \ll M_P^4$. These low lying de Sitter vacua tend to be accompanied by very light scalar bosons/axions. Here we illustrate this phenomenon with the bosonic mass spectra in a set of Type IIB string theory flux compactification models. We conjecture that small $\Lambda$ with light bosons is generic among de Sitter solutions in string theory; that is, the smallness of $\Lambda$ and the existence of very light bosons (may be even the Higgs boson) are results of the statistical preference for such vacua in the landscape. We also discuss a scalar field $\phi^3/\phi^4$ model to illustrate how this statistical preference for a small $\Lambda$ remains when quantum loop corrections are included, thus bypassing the radiative instability problem.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures; added subsection: Finite Temperature and Phase Transitio