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Since the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 academic research has paid considerable attention to understanding the nature of the crisis, its causes and consequences. This is not surprising given the scale and scope of the crisis. Much of this research has been undertaken within social science disciplines. At the same time, the crisis has also been the subject of fiction – novels, poetry and drama, and there is also a small body of academic scholarship on fiction relating to the crisis (and on finance in fiction more generally). The purpose of this paper is to suggest that fiction can offer a new perspective on the global financial crisis and thereby enhance our understanding of it.

This exploration draws upon three works of post-crisis fiction: the 2009 play by David Hare, The Power of Yes: A Dramatist Seeks to Understand the Financial Crisis (hereafter The Power of Yes); Other People’s Money, a novel by Justin Cartwright (2011); and Robert Harris’s novel The Fear Index also published in 2011. Its approach is based on close readings of the three texts in question.

Finance fiction stimulates a reconceptualization of the global financial crisis as a crisis of innovation and technological change.

This paper is a viewpoint article. The originality lies in the author’s interpretation of reading the global financial crisis through fiction.

The purpose of this paper is to build on limited understandings of how readers engage with non-fiction. Drawing from prior research and three recent case studies involving non-fiction reading, this paper considers heterogeneity in modes of reading and the central role of libraries in fostering non-fiction reading cultures.

Findings from three recent case studies of non-fiction reading about relationship advice; developmental disorders; and financial planning, based on qualitative interviews, participant observation and survey data, are used to assess and expand understandings of non-fiction reading and collections.

There is considerable heterogeneity in modes of non-fiction reading, and readers often appropriate non-fiction texts for purposes unintended by the authors. Both physical and online libraries function as sites where non-fiction reading can be used by a broad range of demographic groups to participate in individual or group-based resistance to structural and cultural sources of power and inequality.

This paper provides insight into the role and value of non-fiction collections.

Findings speak to the value of robust funding for print and online non-fiction collections in communities and schools.

This paper offers new empirical and theoretical insight into how non-fiction collections are used by a range of demographic groups in community and school contexts. Sociological theories are introduced to highlight the role of non-fiction collections in facilitating social change at individual and group levels.

This paper's purpose is to show how literary texts can be used as a source for gaining insights into social practices, including accounting. It aims to deepen our understanding of such social practices in their cultural, social, economic and political contexts by examining portrayals of business and accounting transactions and of reflections of social and economic concerns in two German novels set during a time of economic and political crisis, namely the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation period.

The paper analyses, against the historical, social and economic backgrounds of the inflation period, the novels' authors' social and political perspectives as reflected in the novels; the literary devices employed; the way in which the description of business and accounting matters aids our understanding of everyday inflation period transactions and underlying economic and social concerns; and the links made between accounting/business, money and inflation on the one hand, and morality and rationality on the other hand.

The paper finds that in this exceptional economic situation, the relationship between accounting and morality as explored by Maltby is reversed. The portrayal of (often unusual and creative) economic transactions is used to illustrate the lack of economic, legal and moral certainty experienced by individuals and to evoke and critique the damage caused by the hyperinflation on German society and on human relationships, including the commoditisation of all aspects of life and the resulting moral decline.

The paper contributes to the literature exploring the role of representations of business/accounting and finance in narrative fiction. The novels examined here provide an alternative means for observing, interpreting and critiquing social phenomena, specifically in a setting where financial considerations dominate human interaction and social relationships.

THE publication last month of the long‐anticipated Report of the Departmental Public Libraries Committee is, of course, the principal recent event. It is too long to allow us to give a full account of its arguments and conclusions, and in common with all who work for libraries we must return to it again and again in the future. It may be said, however, that it will allay the fears of those who thought that one result of the Committee's deliberations would be to support and to suggest the implementing of the Report of the Adult Education Committee of the lamented Ministry of Reconstruction, which would have handed over the public libraries of the country as a gift to the directors of education. This report does nothing of the kind; it even suggests that as public opinion is clearly opposed to such a course, the libraries should remain in the hands of those who made them an admitted success even under the adverse conditions of the limited rate. Thus the way is open to real progress, and the very confined conditions which would be a necessary result of the absorption of libraries in the official education machinery are not immediately to be dreaded.

Risk factor investing has grown in popularity in recent years and has become a cornerstone of investment portfolios. The goal of factor investing is to generate more returns in the long run. This paper aims to studies the term structure of equity factor. The authors consider the point of view of an American investor and use risk, diversification and performance measures.

The authors combine two methodologies as follows: wavelets and copulas. The authors use daily, weekly and monthly equity factor returns to calibrate wavelets and copulas. Copula functions are useful instruments to describe “joint” fluctuations in different markets, especially to capture nonlinearities, providing a reasonable alternative to the assumption of joint normality. To check robustness, the authors propose three different wavelet mother functions to decompose the data and three different time horizons and the authors add a complementary exercise based on performance and diversification measurement without wavelet transform.

The authors identify temporal horizons for which diversification benefits would be optimized with the decrease in the level of dependence or even the inversion of the dependence structure. Thus, investors seeking diversification with factor investing have to care about the considered horizon: size and book to market factors seem to provide better diversification in the short term. Momentum strategies seem to deliver better diversification in the long run. All the results are very consistent.

Very few papers have documented the diversification properties of the equity risk factors. While factors are built to capture systematic risk premia, their diversification properties are still poorly understood. It is necessary to take into account non-normality of risk factors and to study the diversification over different time horizons. The solution is to use wavelet methodology to decompose returns into temporal series of different maturities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether superior risk-adjusted returns can be generated using monthly covered call option strategies in large capitalized Australian equity portfolios and across varying market volatility conditions.

The authors construct monthly in-the-money (ITM) and out-of-the-money (OTM) S&P/ASX 20 covered call portfolios from 2010 to 2015 and use standard and alternative performance measures. An assessment of variable levels of market volatility on risk-adjusted return performance is also carried out using the spread between implied and realized volatility indexes.

The results of this paper show that covered call writing produces similar nominal returns at lower risk when compared against the standalone buy-and-hold portfolio. Both standard and alternative performance measures (with the exception of the upside potential ratio) demonstrate that covered call portfolios produce superior risk-adjusted returns, particularly when written deeper OTM. The 36-month rolling regressions also reveal that deeper OTM portfolios deliver greater risk-adjusted returns in the majority of the sub-periods investigated. This paper also establishes that volatility spread variation may be a driver of performance for covered call writing in Australia.

The authors suggest that deeper OTM covered call strategies based on large capitalized portfolios create value for investors/fund managers in the Australian stock market and can be executed in volatile market conditions. Such strategies are particularly useful for those seeking market neutral asset allocation and less risk exposure in volatile market environments.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how book group recommendations can be used as a meaningful way to suggest suitable books to users, given the increasing number of individuals engaging in sharing and discussing books on the web.

The authors propose reviews fine-grained classification (CFGC) and its related models such as CFGC1 for book group recommendation. These models can categorize reviews successively by function and role. Constructing the BERT-BiLSTM model to classify the reviews by function. The frequency characteristics of the reviews are mined by word frequency analysis, and the relationship between reviews and total book score is mined by correlation analysis. Then, the reviews are classified into three roles: celebrity, general and passerby. Finally, the authors can form user groups, mine group features and combine group features with book fine-grained ratings to make book group recommendations.

Overall, the best recommendations are made by Synopsis comments, with the accuracy, recall, F-value and Hellinger distance of 52.9%, 60.0%, 56.3% and 0.163, respectively. The F1 index of the recommendations based on the author and the writing comments is improved by 2.5% and 0.4%, respectively, compared to the Synopsis comments.

Previous studies on book recommendation often recommend relevant books for users by mining the similarity between books, so the set of book recommendations recommended to users, especially to groups, always focuses on the few types. The proposed method can effectively ensure the diversity of recommendations by mining users’ tendency to different review attributes of books and recommending books for the groups. In addition, this study also investigates which types of reviews should be used to make book recommendations when targeting groups with specific tendencies.

The purpose of this paper is to share personal reflections on impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on corporate governance and assurance, international finance and economics and non-fiction book publishing. The paper is intended both as a time capsule and as input for future governance and assurance reform and crisis response planning and related research.

This paper is an informal capturing and distillation of some personal experiences and insights relating to corporate governance and assurance, international finance and economics and non-fiction publishing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A key insight from the essay is that the pandemic has had diverse and wide-ranging impacts, many of which are likely to persist beyond the immediate response and recovery periods. The impacts have been felt across the public and private sectors, the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors and different industries.

The author, based in Melbourne, Australia, had an unusually diverse and multi-faceted experience of the pandemic. The essay concludes with directions for further research.

IT is evident from the numerous press cuttings which are reaching us, that we are once more afflicted with one of those periodical visitations of antagonism to Public Libraries, which occasionally assume epidemic form as the result of a succession of library opening ceremonies, or a rush of Carnegie gifts. Let a new library building be opened, or an old one celebrate its jubilee, or let Lord Avebury regale us with his statistics of crime‐diminution and Public Libraries, and immediately we have the same old, never‐ending flood of articles, papers and speeches to prove that Public Libraries are not what their original promoters intended, and that they simply exist for the purpose of circulating American “Penny Bloods.” We have had this same chorus, with variations, at regular intervals during the past twenty years, and it is amazing to find old‐established newspapers, and gentlemen of wide reading and knowledge, treating the theme as a novelty. One of the latest gladiators to enter the arena against Public Libraries, is Mr. J. Churton Collins, who contributes a forcible and able article, on “Free Libraries, their Functions and Opportunities,” to the Nineteenth Century for June, 1903. Were we not assured by its benevolent tone that Mr. Collins seeks only the betterment of Public Libraries, we should be very much disposed to resent some of the conclusions at which he has arrived, by accepting erroneous and misleading information. As a matter of fact, we heartily endorse most of Mr. Collins' ideas, though on very different grounds, and feel delighted to find in him an able exponent of what we have striven for five years to establish, namely, that Public Libraries will never be improved till they are better financed and better staffed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of standard‐setting bodies and rating agencies which compete for authority in Islamic finance. It does so through a consideration of a recent debate over the permissibility of sukuk financing.

The methods used are a combination of archival and bibliographic research, coupled with the author's previous research on Islamic banking and finance.

While the debate over sukuk hinged on whether the structures are shari'a compliant in form only, not in substance, the role of sukuk in neoliberal reform and the privatization of state resources reveal a deeper potential conflict between Islamic standard‐setting bodies and global neoliberal projects more broadly.

The implications are significant for other Islamic finance contractual forms and modes of finance. They are also significant in light of the global financial crisis, and the recent debt crisis in Dubai. The research limitations have to do with the fact that this is a fast‐moving field and the global financial crisis has destabilized many institutions – both conventional and Islamic – in structured finance.

Few scholars have considered sukuk's legitimacy, or the competition between Islamic standard‐setting bodies and non‐Islamic global rating agencies.