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We consider the problem of moral disjunction in professional and business activities from a virtue-ethical perspective. Moral disjunction arises when the behavioral demands of a role conflict with personal morality; it is an important problem because most people in modern societies occupy several complex roles that can cause this clash to occur. We argue that moral disjunction, and the psychological mechanisms that people use to cope with it, are problematic because they make it hard to pursue virtue and to live with integrity. We present role coadunation as a process with epistemic and behavioral aspects that people can use to resolve moral disjunction with integrity. When role coadunation is successful, it enables people to live virtuous lives of appropriate narrative disunity and to honor their identity-conferring commitments. We show how role coadunation can be facilitated by interpretive communities and discuss the emergence and ideal features of those communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a response to the article "The social ontology of purpose: How organizations can have goals and intentions without having a mind," by F. Martela, which appeared within the issue. The authors respond to Martela's view that organizational purpose can only exist in the beliefs that individual humans have about that purpose. They explain they believe that organizations exist in order to sustain corporate minds. They thank Martela for beginning a conversation about the corporate mind and propose that the corporate mind is ontologically subjective but epistemically objective.

This article presents a theory of organizational purpose that is normatively neutral and, hence, can be deployed to study firms without prejudging their role in society. The argument employs two philosophical concepts: intentionality and speech acts. The first is used to conceptualize the corporate mind, which is a set of long-lived beliefs about the world as it is and intentions about the world as it will be that drives organizational activity. Corporate minds allow for complex and valuable forms of social cooperation and, hence, the article argues that the purpose of any organization is to sustain a corporate mind. Five core attributes enable organizations to fulfill this purpose: authorization, property rights, the ability to contract, the capacity to deliberate, and conversability. Conversability allows organizations to perform speech acts; that is, to make statements about the corporate mind that are referred to in this article as meta-contractual avowals. The article provides a value-neutral account of corporate governance as the set of devices that ensures the consistency of an organization's corporate mind, meta-contractual avowals, and authorized actions. This theory sheds light upon the structure of purpose discourse and the relationship between different theories of the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a second-personal account of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to the first-personal approach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation's ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the relevance of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9957.2010.02196.x Byline: ALAN D. MORRISON (1) Abstract: Outcomes in financial markets depend upon the information available to market participants, and upon the contractual commitments that they can make. Many important commitments in financial markets are made outside the formal law, using institutional mechanisms that provide a plausible basis for commitment. Advances in information technology and changes to the political environment alter the institutions that are needed to support economic life, and hence should result in regulatory change. I illustrate this point with examples from investment and commercial banking, and I relate the design of regulatory institutions to the political and technological environment within which they operate. Author Affiliation: (1)Said Business School, University of Oxford, CEPR

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5957.2006.02002.x Byline: Gyongyi Loranth (1), Alan D. Morrison (1) Keywords: multinational bank; capital adequacy requirements; deposit insurance; financial contagion Abstract: Abstract: Banking sector globalization has caused an expansion in foreign-owned bank assets. In this paper we analyse the effects of a MNB's liability structure upon its investment in a foreign country. We develop a model in which capital adequacy requirements introduce some deliberate underinvestment which counters deposit insurance-induced overinvestment. Diversification is unattractive with fixed bank capital requirements, because it reduces the expected value of the deposit insurance net. This effect applies in multinational banks (MNBs), where shocks to the home country economy alter the value of the deposit insurance net and hence affect overseas lending incentives. Thus, MNBs act as a channel for financial contagion. We discuss the policy implications of our results. Author Affiliation: (1)(1)The authors are respectively from the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge and CEPR; and the Said Business School, University of Oxford and CEPR. An earlier version of this paper was circulated with the title 'Multinational Bank Capital Regulation with Deposit Insurance and Diversification Effects.' Article History: (Paper received December 2005, revised version accepted October 2006. Online publication June 2007) Article note: (*) Address for correspondence: Alan Morrison, Merton College, Oxford OX1 4JD, UK., e-mail: alan.morrison@sbs.ox.ac.uk

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2005.05.001 Byline: Tim Jenkinson (b)(c), Alan D. Morrison (b)(c), William J. Wilhelm (a)(b)(c) Abstract: Unlike in the U.S., the initial price range for European IPOs is seldom revised, although issues are often priced at the upper bound. We develop a model that explains this seemingly inefficient pricing behavior. As in Europe, but not in the U.S., underwriters in the model obtain information from investors before establishing the indicative price range. A commitment to stay within the range is necessary to extract private information from investors. Ours is therefore the first treatment in which the bookbuilding range has a clear economic role. The model has important implications for empirical research based on European primary market data. Author Affiliation: (a) McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, USA (b) SaiA[umlaut]d Business School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK (c) CEPR, London, UK Article History: Received 4 July 2004; Revised 15 November 2004; Accepted 2 May 2005 Article Note: (footnote) [star] We thank Bill Schnoor and Howard Jones for sharing their legal and institutional expertise and Rajesh Aggarwal, David Goldreich, Giancarlo Giudici, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Ann Sherman for providing valuable feedback. We are grateful to the referee for extremely detailed and insightful comments that materially improved the paper. We also thank Alexander Ljungqvist for organizing the data reported in Table 1.

The research on information acquisition market maker models and their usage in dermining the liquidity of commodities markets is extended.

We present a model that explains why investment bankers struggle to manage conflicts of interest. Banks can build a type reputation for technical competence by performing complex deals that may not serve their clients' interest; on the other hand, banks can sustain a behavioral reputation by refraining from doing so. A behavioral reputation is a luxury reserved for banks that have proven their abilities. The model sheds light on conflicts between the trading and advisory divisions of investment banks, as well as the consequences of technological change for time variation in the relative strength of behavioral- and type-reputation concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]