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This paper aims to provide an experiential exercise for management and leadership educators to use in the course of their teaching duties.

The approach of this classroom teaching method uses an experiential exercise to teach Adams’ equity theory and Vroom’s expectancy theory.

This experiential exercise has proven useful in teaching two major theories of motivation and is often cited as one of the more memorable classes students experience.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is an original experiential exercise for teaching the equity and expectancy theories of motivation.

This article outlines a personal Journey Line Narrative exercise aimed at enhancing leader authenticity and effectiveness by asking students to “look back” and identify their core values, as well as the formative experiences that helped solidify those values. The Journey Line Narrative encourages reflection and self-awareness by asking students to answer the question “Who am I?”, to articulate this reflection to a mentor, and to distill this reflection into a coherent essay. This exercise can be useful in courses focused on leader development by helping aspiring leaders develop and communicate their authenticity, core values, and purpose

In 2020, the latest James Bond film will hit cinema screens. The film has been produced by Eon Productions, is based on Ian Fleming’s suave, sophisticated super spy and stars Daniel Craig in the title role. With a troubled production shoot well-documented in the media, Daniel Craig often seeming and contradictorily at odds of being both enamoured and loathing with the role, a director leaving through ‘creative differences’ and numerous screenwriters being drafted in as last-minute replacements or add-ons, it will be interesting to see how the latest Bond adventure fares both critically and financially.

At their heart, the Bond adventures – originally in Ian Fleming’s novels and short stories, and then in their film incarnations before spilling out into newer platforms – offer pure escapism for the reader, viewer, listener and gamer. Set against the backdrop of exoticism in a post-war climate, the stories centre around MI6 Agent, James Bond, stopping enemies of the British Empire in their attempts at world domination. They gave the reader a sense of both an attempt by Fleming/Bond to recapture Britain as an important power on the world stage. Whilst Bond may have sipped martinis as he coolly dispatched the latest despotic tyrant, they also offered up ideas about time, place, culture, the social climate of the period and gender.

This book will focus on numerous aspects of the Bond-catalogue, but in particular paying particular attention to how the portrayal of gender, both in the stories and behind the scenes, has helped shape one of the most significant, important and successful British franchises.

The purpose of this paper is to study the correlation structure of the credit spreads.

The minimal spanning tree is used to find the risk center node and the basic correlation structure of the credit spreads. The dynamic copula and pair copula models are applied to capture the dynamic and non-linear correlation structure.

The authors take the enterprise bond with trading data from January 2013 to December 2013 as the research sample. The empirical study of minimum spanning tree shows that the credit risk of corporate bonds forms a network structure with a center node. Meanwhile, the correlation between credit spreads shows dynamic characteristics. Under the framework of dynamic copula, the lower tail dependence is less than the upper tail dependence, thus, in economic boom period, the dynamic correlation is more significant than in recession period. The authors also find that the centrality of credit risk network is not significant according to the pair copula and Granger causality test. The empirical study shows that the goodness-of-fit of D vine is superior to Canonical vine, and the Granger causality test additionally proves that the center node has influence on few other nodes in the risk network, thus the center node captured by the minimum spanning tree is a weak center node, and this characteristic of credit risk network indicates that the risk network of credit spreads is generated mostly by the external shocks rather than the internal risk contagion.

This paper provides new ideas for investors and researchers to analyze the credit risk correlation or contagion.

In this article, the authors develop an arbitrage approach to valuing insurance‐linked securities (ILS) for non‐catastrophic events within a framework of stochastic interest rates. The prices of these transactions are driven by both an interest rate process and a non‐trivial actuarial risk process. The authors find that the duration of ILS is, in most cases, higher than the Macaulay duration of risk‐free bonds, which implies that the alleged relative out‐performance of ILS is illusory.

The adhesion between electroless copper and a substrate is one of the most important factors in the reliability of thermoplastic printed circuit boards. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of mechanical grinding and acid etching of thermoplastic substrate materials on the adhesion of copper deposited by an electroless copper plating process. The base material of the test substrates was a new high temperature thermoplastic polyphenylene oxide (PPO) compound.

The effects of pre‐treatment on plastic surfaces are analyzed by the following methods: Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), SEM, the Dyne surface energy test and the surface roughness test. The adhesion between electroless copper and thermoplastic substrate is measured with a peel strength test.

The results showed that mechanical grinding of the substrates significantly increased adhesion but the highest adhesion is gained by using an acid etch treatment before electroless plating. These results indicated that adhesion between copper and the substrates was not directly proportional to the roughness and surface energy values.

The conventional sweller/desmear treatment used in a printed circuit board factory for pre‐treating epoxy based laminates prior to electroless plating is not suitable for these PPO compound boards. The copper adhesion is adequate when the substrates are etched with sulphuric acid/chromate solution. In that case the bonding between the metal layer and the plastic surface is stronger than the bondings between the polymer chains of the thermoplastic material. The adhesion mechanism of electroless copper in these mechanically abraded samples is mechanical interlocking of metal particles.

Many African Americans cheered the election of President Obama in 2008 with the hope he would cause an easing of the pain of economic and political barriers to collective black progress in America. This chapter assesses the role of President Obama in addressing these issues.

The Presidential Bully Pulpit is presented as a framework for addressing racial inequities. Properly used it can bring keen attention to issues a president deems important for consideration by the American public. Socio-historical texts and secondary data are used.

Data are presented to show how racial discrimination continues to affect African Americans during the age of Obama. These include housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and racial profiling. This chapter shows Mr. Obama has not used the office of the presidency as a bully pulpit for addressing these racial inequities. Rather he has tended to use the bully pulpit to chastise blacks, especially black males.

Also discussed are some promising developments challenging racism that have emerged from his administration, primarily from the Department of Justice, and how President Obama could use the bully pulpit more productively.

This chapter presents a contradiction in the actions of President Obama. While he seldom uses the bully pulpit to push his own legislative agendas or to push toward solutions to relieve racial inequities in society, he does use the bully pulpit to criticize black males.

In the context of the current financial crisis, this paper aims to examine values and spirituality in the modern workplace.

Using contemporary examples and examining recent literature on spirituality and loneliness, the paper considers the concept of loneliness and argues that this may stem from an over‐preoccupation with the workplace and employment‐based achievement, at the expense of having rounded lives as human beings.

It is demonstrated that, over the last decade at least, the levels of stress in life and work have risen noticeably. In this context, leaders need even more to be forgers of a sense of meaning and purpose in the workplace and engage the hearts and minds of staff towards improved outcomes.

The current financial crisis is also a major spiritual crisis. Now there seems to be a growing gap between leaders and the led, and an increase in what the author terms “soul‐less leadership”, which fails to engage and motivate and inspire. The author calls on leaders in this crisis of capitalism to work and engage with staff in health and social care, so that those serving at the frontline feel‐valued and supported, developed and engaged in a common purpose.

Bond insurance is commonly employed to reduce the cost of issuing debt. Since interest and principal payments of insured issues are guaranteed by a highly rated counterparty, investors require a lower yield to purchase insured bond issues relative to uninsured bond issues for the same credit. The authors of this article compare the cost‐effectiveness of “up‐front” to “pay‐as‐you‐go” premium payment plans for insuring callable bonds.

The volume of municipal bond insurance declined dramatically following the financial crisis of 2008. Insurance now is making a gradual comeback. Two related considerations complicate identification of the best insurance plan. One is the current practice in the municipal market of issuing callable bonds with an above-market coupon; such bonds are very likely to be refunded. The other is that the cost of insurance may depend on when the bonds are refunded. This paper shows how contemporary fixed income analytics can be applied to identifying the best payment plan.

When the structure of the bond issue is fixed, the benefit from insurance is simply in the increase in proceeds from the better pricing. The debt service is adjusted to incorporate the cashflows associated with insurance. The optimum time of refunding depends on the adjusted cashflows. The effective insurance cost is the difference between the present value of the debt service with and without the adjustment for insurance payments.

The timing of refunding is a critical determinant of which premium payment plan is the best deal. For a given bond structure, the likelihood of refunding favors plans that are contingent on that event.

The paper proposes an analytically rigorous approach to identifying the most cost-effective bond insurance plan. The findings are relevant to participants in municipal finance, including issuers and their advisors, underwriters and bond insurance companies.