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Our chapter raises serious questions about the long-term efficiency of stock prices in relation to the realized returns of the underlying corporate real assets. In our large-scale calculations that cover horizons of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years, returns on corporate real assets suffer a long-term decline, and have been below the yields of 10-year Treasury bonds since 1973. Real assets that received more external financing from capital markets and institutions actually report even lower realized long-term returns. The decline in realized returns cannot be attributed to declining risks as the volatilities of realized returns have been increasing over time. These surprising results may stimulate fresh debate on the roles and long-term performance of capital markets and institutions.

The protective aspects of relationships for health have been extensively studied. Here, we assess whether different dimensions of partnership status at the time of a child’s birth are associated with better self-assessed health later in mid-life. Data are from three countries with different social welfare policies relating to union status and parenting: the US, the UK, and Norway. Results indicate that women who were partnered at first birth had better health at midlife in all three countries than women who were unpartnered. The analysis indicates no differences in the mid-life health of Norwegian women who were married or cohabiting at birth, whereas for US and UK women, being married at the birth of a first child is more beneficial for mid-life health than bearing the child in a cohabiting union. In the US, women who are least likely to marry do not demonstrate better mid-life health if they had wed relative to cohabiting. In the UK, in contrast, the women least likely to be married at the birth experience better returns if they marry. These findings highlight the importance of paying closer attention to heterogeneous treatment effects as they relate to childbearing, relationship status, and mid-life health.

The Japanese economy experienced prosperity during the bubble economy and has suffered from a prolonged recession since the bubble economy collapsed. This paper examines how the interest-bearing debt burden, structural change, and instability of confidence affect dynamic systems. Moreover, it examines these factors in the Japanese economy by applying a recursive vector autoregression analysis. This paper emphasizes the interest-bearing debt burden, the economic structure resulting from the instability of confidence, and the instability of confidence resulting from debt burden play important roles in the instability of the economy. As a result, Japan’s economy was determined to be relatively stable from 1980 to 1996, but was unstable, thereafter.

This text analyzes the relationship between crises and the dominance of interest-bearing capital, with particular emphasis on fictitious capital, which forms a striking feature of contemporary capitalist economies. It discusses how capitalist crises are commonly viewed and how we should understand them, on several dimensions of reality, based on a comprehensive reading of Marx. We follow with a reflection on the nature and characteristics of interest-bearing capital and on fictitious capital and fictitious profit, given that the high activity of this last form of capital is a hallmark of current capitalism and is itself the maximum expression of the fetishism engendered by it. We conclude that what is understood as a crisis by people in general is, in fact, a source of enormous enrichment for the owners of fictitious capital.

Considerations of the legal rights of incarcerated juveniles are often concerned with the myriad ways in which due process rights are circumscribed, abridged, or undermined by the operations of the juvenile court (e.g., Berkheiser, 2016; Cleary, 2017; Feld, 1999; Rapisarda & Kaplan, 2016). Studies of youth legal consciousness have additionally sought to explore the role of media, legal status, court experiences, and even parents in the formation of youth attitudes about the justice system (e.g., Abrego, 2011; Brisman, 2010; Greene, Sprott, Madon, & Jung, 2010; Pennington, 2017). This chapter builds on this work by exploring the way rights shaped the everyday lives of incarcerated youth. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a juvenile hall, this chapter explores three different moments outside of a formal legal context where the invocation of due process rights limited the self-expression and exploration of incarcerated youth. In each of these cases, the invocation of protecting due process rights by adults served to stifle youth efforts to remake juvenile hall as a place open and receptive to their needs. These three moments demonstrate that rights project a particular legal vision onto a world that does not neatly conform to the reality in which youth lived. For these reasons, the consideration of legal rights for youth must also consider how these rights can forestall the very transformation in circumstances that many youth seek.

The purpose of this chapter is to characterize fictitious capital and fictitious profits as extreme expressions of the fetishism of capital. Considering the incessant search for valorization and allowing for fictitious forms of capital, the subject of this study is at the center of the dynamics of recent capitalist accumulation, especially when we take into account the capitalist crises over the last four or five decades. Its mechanism of fictitious valorization (M – M′), a decisive dimension of contemporary capitalism, is contradictory, based on the growing obstacles to the extraction of surplus value on an expanded scale, and therefore the real valorization of capital. At the same time, we support the idea that this mass of overaccumulated capital produces profits unrelated to surplus value, that is fictitious profits, further intensifying the fetishistic and contradictory nature of capitalism.

Purpose: Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is non-physical or the digital equivalent of physical money issued by a central bank. Nigeria became the first African country to issue a CBDC, popularly known as the eNaira. This chapter highlights the redesign features that eNaira should possess to offer payment solutions and macroeconomic stability effectively.

Methodology: The chapter used discourse analysis to highlight the features the eNaira should possess.

Findings: The chapter suggests that the eNaira should have an interest-bearing status, have enhanced security features, and offer zero transaction costs on eNaira transactions. These are design features which the eNaira presently lacks.

Originality: This chapter is the first to suggest redesign features for an already issued CBDC. It is also the first to highlight the design features of a CBDC in the African continent.