Mutuality talk in a family-owned multinational: anthropological categories & critical analyses of corporate ethicizing

This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting ‘mutuality in business’ as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both interpretations foreground a central problem in recent writing on the anthropology of business/corporations: the tension between the claim that economic life is always embedded within a moral calculus, and the shift towards increasingly ethical behaviour among many corporations. Further, recent work in the anthropology of business rejects normative evaluations of corporate ethicizing. When corporations lay claim to ethical renewal, but maintain a commitment to competition and growth, then anthropologists must balance a sympathetic engagement with corporate ethicizing, and critical engagement with growth-based strategie

Dynamic Factor Analysis for Measuring Money

Technological innovations in the financial industry pose major problems for the measurement of monetary aggregates. The authors describe work on a new measure of money that has a more satisfactory means of identifying and removing the effects of financial innovations. The new method distinguishes between the measured data (currency and deposit balances) and the underlying phenomena of interest (the intended use of money for transactions and savings). Although the classification scheme used for monetary aggregates was originally designed to provide a proxy for the phenomena of interest, it is breaking down. The authors feel it is beneficial to move to an explicit attempt to measure an index of intended use. The distinction is only a preliminary step. It provides a mechanism that allows for financial innovations to affect measured data without fundamentally altering the underlying phenomena being measured, but it does not automatically accommodate financial innovations. To achieve that step will require further work. At least intuitively, however, the focus on an explicit measurement model provides a better framework for identifying when financial innovations change the measured data. Although the work is preliminary, and there are many outstanding problems, if the approach proves successful it will result in the most fundamental reformulation in the way money is measured since the introduction of monetary aggregates half a century ago. The authors review previous methodologies and describe a dynamic factor approach that makes an explicit distinction between the measured data and the underlying phenomena. They present some preliminary estimates using simulated and real data.Econometric and statistical methods; Monetary aggregates; Monetary and financial indicators

Money and Credit Factors

The authors introduce new measures of important underlying macroeconomic phenomena that affect the financial side of the economy. These measures are calculated using the time-series factor analysis (TSFA) methodology introduced in Gilbert and Meijer (2005). The measures appear to be both more interesting and more robust to the effects of financial innovations than traditional aggregates. The general ideas set out in Gilbert and Pichette (2003) are pursued, but the improved estimation methods of TSFA are used. Furthermore, four credit aggregates are added to the components of the monetary aggregates, resulting in the possibility of extracting more common factors.Credit and credit aggregates; Monetary aggregates; Econometric and statistical methods

The Bank of Canada's Senior Loan Officer Survey

The Bank of Canada maintains regular contact with financial institutions as part of the information-gathering process that feeds into the larger set of information used to arrive at its monetary policy decision. Since 1999, the Bank has been conducting a quarterly survey of the business-lending practices of major Canadian financial institutions. Analysis of the information collected shows that it is correlated with future growth in both credit and business investment. This article focuses on how the survey is conducted and describes the construction of the summary statistics, highlighting the key statistical relationships in the historical survey data.

Horizontal transfer of OC1 transposons in the Tasmanian devil

BACKGROUND There is growing recognition that horizontal DNA transfer, a process known to be common in prokaryotes, is also a significant source of genomic variation in eukaryotes. Horizontal transfer of transposable elements (HTT) may be especially prevalent in eukaryotes given the inherent mobility, widespread occurrence, and prolific abundance of these elements in many eukaryotic genomes. RESULTS Here, we provide evidence for a new case of HTT of the transposon family OposCharlie1 (OC1) in the Tasmanian devil, Sarcophilus harrisii. Bioinformatic analyses of OC1 sequences in the Tasmanian devil genome suggest that this transposon infiltrated the common ancestor of the Dasyuridae family ~17 million years ago. This estimate is corroborated by a PCR-based screen for the presence/absence of this family in Tasmanian devils and closely-related species. CONCLUSIONS This case of HTT is the first to be reported in dasyurids. It brings the number of animal lineages independently invaded by OC1 to 12, and adds a fourth continent to the pandemic-like pattern of invasion of this transposon. In the context of these data, we discuss the evolutionary history of this transposon family and its potential impact on the diversification of marsupials.The authors would like to acknowledge the following organizations for funding portions of this work: NIH-R01 GM077582 (CF), M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust (SS) and NSF-MCB-1150213 (SS