Does Community and Environmental Responsibility Affect Firm Risk? Evidence from UK Panel Data 1994-2006

The question of how an individual firm’s environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decreases its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous cost that increases such risk levels for these firms? Answers to this question have important implications for the management of companies and the investment decisions of individuals and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate environmental performance and firm risk in the British context. Using the largest dataset so far assembled, with Community and Environmental Responsibility (CER) rankings for all rated UK companies between 1994 and 2006, we show that a company’s environmental performance is inversely related to its systematic financial risk. However, an increase of 1.0 in the CER score is associated with only a 0.02 reduction in firm’s risk and cost of capital

Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry

Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry

Trending now: feminism, sexism, misogyny and postfeminism in British journalism

In the last few years feminism has gained spectacular visibility across media and popular culture. As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) observes, “everywhere you turn, there is an expression of feminism – on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyrics of a pop song, in an inspirational instagram post, in an acceptance speech”. News media have been pivotal to this, not only reporting on feminist campaigns such as slutwalk or metoo, or on feminist demonstrations like the Women’s marches, but also centering feminism as a topic of discussion – whether substantively in terms of equal pay or sexual violence, or more broadly as something to be routinely asked of politicians, actresses or pop stars. “The new DO: Calling yourself a feminist” announced Glamour magazine in the US, cementing a wider impression that no interview of a high-profile woman is complete without its subject being asked about their views of or identification with feminism

Proposal for experimental test of the time-dependent Wigner inequalities for neutral pseudoscalar meson systems

Recently a new class of time-dependent Bell inequalities in Wigner form was introduced. The structure of the inequalities allows experimental studies of quantum and open quantum systems in external fields. In this paper we study the properties of the time dependent Wigner inequalities using the time evolution of neutral pseudoscalar mesons. It is shown that it is always possible to find a range of parameters to test for violation in an experimentally accessible area. The effect of the relaxation of the inequalities for large time scales is demonstrated.Comment: Published in Phys. Rev.

There is no new physics in the multiplicative anomaly

We discuss the role of the multiplicative anomaly for a complex scalar field at finite temperature and density. It is argued that physical considerations must be applied to determine which of the many possible expressions for the effective action obtained by the functional integral method is correct. This is done by first studying the non-relativistic field where the thermodynamic potential is well-known. The relativistic case is also considered. We emphasize that the role of the multiplicative anomaly is not to lead to new physics, but rather to preserve the equality among the various expressions for the effective action.Comment: 24 pages, RevTex, no figure

A Minimalist Turbulent Boundary Layer Model

We introduce an elementary model of a turbulent boundary layer over a flat surface, given as a vertical random distribution of spanwise Lamb-Oseen vortex configurations placed over a non-slip boundary condition line. We are able to reproduce several important features of realistic flows, such as the viscous and logarithmic boundary sublayers, and the general behavior of the first statistical moments (turbulent intensity, skewness and flatness) of the streamwise velocity fluctuations. As an application, we advance some heuristic considerations on the boundary layer underlying kinematics that could be associated with the phenomenon of drag reduction by polymers, finding a suggestive support from its experimental signatures.Comment: 5 pages, 10 figure

Bose-Einstein condensation as symmetry breaking in compact curved spacetimes

We examine Bose-Einstein condensation as a form of symmetry breaking in the specific model of the Einstein static universe. We show that symmetry breaking never occursin the sense that the chemical potential $\mu$ never reaches its critical value.This leads us to some statements about spaces of finite volume in general. In an appendix we clarify the relationship between the standard statistical mechanical approaches and the field theory method using zeta functions.Comment: Revtex, 25 pages, 3 figures, uses EPSF.sty. To be published in Phys. Rev.

Isolation and characterization of Vibrio parahaemolyticus from seafoods along the southwest coast of India

The work was aimed to study the microbial quality of the seafood sold in the domestic markets and incidence of Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Samples comprising of shellfish, finfish, and cephalopodswere collected fromvarious fish markets in and around Cochin. Presumed V. parahaemolyticus were identified by standard biochemical tests, and further confirmed by polymerase chain reaction targeting species-specific tl gene (450 bp)