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Alvin Hansen and John Williams’ Fiscal Policy Seminar at Harvard University is widely regarded as a key mechanism for the spread of Keynesianism in the United States. An original and regular participant, Richard A. Musgrave was invited to prepare remarks for the fiftieth anniversary of the seminar in 1988. These were never published, though a copy was filed with Musgrave’s papers at Princeton University. Their reproduction here is important for several reasons. First, it is one of the last reminiscences of the original participants. Second, the remarks make an important contribution to our understanding of the Harvard School of macro-fiscal policy. Third, the remarks provide interesting insights into Musgrave’s views on national economic policymaking as well as the intersection between theory and practice. The reminiscence demonstrates the importance of the seminar in shifting Musgrave’s research focus and moving him to a more pragmatic approach to public finance.

This chapter examines the influence of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy on some of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the past three decades. Mobilizing the epistemic community framework, it demonstrates how network members, acting as amici curiae, litigators, academics, and judges worked to transmit intellectual capital to Supreme Court decision makers in 12 federalism and separation of powers cases decided between 1983 and 2001. It finds that Federalist Society members were most successful in diffusing ideas into Supreme Court opinions in cases where doctrinal distance was greatest; that is, cases where the Supreme Court moved the farthest from its established constitutional framework.

Purpose – The purpose of this work is to explore ways in which parents of children with disabilities actively seek to create a place for themselves and their children within supportive communities of others – despite structural and attitudinal barriers.

Methodology – Semi-structured, interactive interviews were conducted with six mothers and six fathers of older teens and young adults with severe impairments. Interview transcripts were analyzed for themes related to barriers to social participation and strategies used to create and sustain communities of supportive others.

Findings – Results suggest that, while there are indeed many barriers to social participation, these mothers and fathers have successfully utilized a variety of strategies in order to create a sense of community for themselves and their children including: garnering support from family; creating enclaves of “wise” individuals; and active social networking. Findings also suggest that children with disabilities can provide opportunities for parental community involvement in unexpected ways.

Limitations, implications and value – The sample is small and selective and the study used retrospective interviews to examine parental memories. Despite these limitations, the narratives of these parents provide a provocative look at the potential role of personal agency in the community experiences of parents of children with disabilities. The stories told by these parents clearly suggest that it takes concerted effort to construct a village in the face of significant barriers to social participation. Once created, however, that village of supportive others can provide life enhancing support for children with disabilities and their families.

The chapter surveys recent developments in economics of contract interpretation. First, we point out the relevance of issue of contract interpretation to contracting problems. We then introduce a general economic model of contract interpretation. It explains why parties write gaps and fairly general terms in contracts, how the court should interpret them, and whether courts should always enforce what contracting parties write. Moreover, we explain why there are contradictions in contracts.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

The figure of the female revenger has haunted the western imagination as far back as some of the earliest extant texts, most starkly in Euripides' tragedies Hecuba and Medea (c. 430–420 bc). She has tended to take on one of three forms: the scorned woman, the vengeful mother or the victim of physical violence, almost always sexual violence.

This chapter presents an interdisciplinary and transhistorical understanding of the troubling figure of the violent female revenger in her shifting incarnations. The investigation traces conceptual strands through a variety of cultural texts, focusing on specific instances that are both situated historically and simultaneously analysed for the ways in which they reflect recurring priorities and cultural anxieties through the centuries.

After considering key ideas such as revenge and justice and gender and revenge, the chapter looks more closely at the so-called rape-revenge genre, moving from the earliest examples such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to more recent films which are considered for the ways they intersect with the global feminist protest movement #MeToo, and other key cultural moments such as the Harvey Weinstein case and the very public trial of the USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar: Revenge (2017), The Nightingale (2018) and Promising Young Woman (2020). The chapter draws direct lines of connection between imaginative works, cultural types and stereotypes, and lived reality in order to come to a fuller understanding of the female revenger.

This chapter considers viable and nonviable methods for corruption and ethics reform. Among the different types of methods considered are: vision and values based methods; win-win incentive and ethics networking methods; power-based top-down compliance and bottom-up whistle-blowing methods; alternative institution building methods; and, social movement methods. The chapter analyzes how the different types of methods can be more and less viable depending upon the specific multilevel situational factors related to micro individual, meso organizational, and macro institutional level, political-economic, and cultural obstacles to corruption and ethics reform.

Fairness is central to any multilateral regime, that is, any agreement between multiple nation-states to address and resolve a common problem. Climate change mitigation is among the key global environmental concerns that will require a common agenda, approach, and set of actions by the community of nations. To that end, global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992) are centered on establishing a multilateral framework to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all nations and to help those who would be affected by climate change.

The economics literature on gender has expanded considerably in recent years, fueled in part by new sources of data, including from experimental studies of gender differences in preferences and other traits. At the same time, economists have been developing more realistic models of psychological and social influences on individual choices and the evolution of culture and social norms. Despite these innovations, much of the economics of gender has been left behind, and still employs a reductive framing in which gender gaps in economic outcomes are either due to discrimination or to “choice.” I suggest here that the persistence of this approach is due to several distinctive economic habits of mind – strong priors driven by market bias and gender essentialism, a perspective that views the default economic agent as male, and an oft-noted tendency to avoid complex problems in favor of those that can be modeled simply. I also suggest some paths forward.

This chapter contributes to the discourse on the impact of employee participation in organisations. Using worker co-operatives as special cases of participatory firms, we discuss the role of values in organisations and their importance in a business context. We devise and apply the CoopIndex diagnostic tool as a method of assessment of the ‘health’ of an organisation whose members aspire to align co-operative management with the application of the co-operative principles and values.