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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.

This chapter explores queer theory as a “thought of a method” in educational ethnography by sharing stories of two third grade boys and situating them in a discussion of Britzman’s ideas about reading and Butler’s notion of fantasy. The stories are presented as a possible queer educational ethnography, in which the ethnographer writes the fantastic narrative of the boys as they read creatively to reveal and unsettle gender and reading as sites of constraint to which other constraints adhere. The boys’ reading itself is a queer reading of these constraints and as such makes alterity visible and possible. The study and the methodological framework suggest that educational ethnographers and other adults who work in schools should become attuned to the markers of constraint and alterity, so as to recognize, shelter, and maintain the alterity that children make possible. The chapter asserts children must be allowed to read for alterity, and shows how fantastic narratives that emerge from such readings are limited by the hushing of individuals who disallow alterity in classrooms. Ultimately, this chapter is relevant to ethnographers of education in that it suggests that queer theory not only is necessary to narrate and thus shelter the ways that gender can and should be unsettled in classrooms, but also allows us to narrate and shelter other queer urgencies related to fear, violence, and vulnerability that children experience or share in classrooms. Implications for the current climate of school reform based on standardization of curriculum are also discussed.

The present chapter reviews part of the literature that focuses on dark tourism and dark consumption. The main theories were placed under the critical lens of scrutiny. With strongholds and weaknesses, dark tourism seems to be enframed in an ‘economic-based paradigm’, which prioritises the managerial perspective over other methods. Like Dark Tourist, the Netflix documentary assessed in this chapter, this academic perspective accepts that the tourist's experience is the only valid source of information to understand the phenomenon. Rather, we hold the thesis that far from being a local trend, dark tourism evinces a morbid drive which not only emerges recently but involves other facets and spheres of society. We coin the term Thana-capitalism to denote a passage from risk society to a new stage, where the Other's death is situated as the main commodity to exchange. The risk society as it was imagined by Beck, set finally the pace to thana-capitalism. Dark Tourist proffers an interesting platform to gain further understanding of this slippery matter. In sharp contrast to Seaton, Sharpley or Stone, we argue that dark tourists are unable to create empathy with the victims. Instead, they visit these types of marginal destinations in order to re-elaborate a political attachment with their institutions. They consume the Other's pain not only to feel unique and special (a word that sounds all the time in the documentary) but also to affirm their privileged role as part of the selected peoples.

This study examines several aspects of active portfolio management by equity hedge funds between 1996 and 2013. Consistent with the idea that cross-sectional return dispersion is a proxy for the market’s available alpha, our results show that equity hedge funds achieve their strongest performance during periods of elevated dispersion. The performance advantage is robust to numerous risk adjustments. Portfolio managers may use the current month’s dispersion to plan the extent to which the following month’s investment approach will be active or passive. We also estimate the active share for equity hedge funds and find an average of 53%. We further document the average annual expense ratio for managing hedge funds’ active share to be about 7%. This figure is remarkably close to active expense ratios reported previously for equity mutual funds, which may be interpreted as evidence of uniform pricing for active portfolio management services.

This chapter examines the integration of Giving Voice to Values (GVV) into an accounting ethics course. GVV has received a great deal of interest by business educators in the past decade and, more recently, by those accounting faculty who teach accounting ethics in a standalone course or as part of another course. This chapter describes GVV assumptions and principles that are helpful for any faculty considering adopting GVV. After a brief review of different instructional approaches for teaching accounting ethics, GVV literature relating to accounting ethics is examined. The integration of GVV builds on the Kelly (2017) integration of leadership topics in an accounting ethics course and synergistically promotes moral motivation and moral character that contributes to ethical behavior. To facilitate the integration efforts, this chapter presents specific learning objectives, GVV background materials, case recommendations, and application/assessment approaches. This chapter concludes with a discussion of GVV and its possible role in assurance of learning efforts.