Search results

Although music can be used in social studies classrooms to give students a picture of society from different time periods, modern music of all genres can help students understand more recent historical events. This practitioner paper seeks to assist and encourage teachers to utilize modern music for present-day analysis of society. We will address the current events of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and help teacher’s stimulate critical responses in students by using a variety of musical genres to analyze multiple perspectives of the wars. Teaching strategies and assessing students through authentic engagement with content and artists are discussed and we conclude by offering a sample lesson plan using a model of analysis.

Climate change poses diverse, often fundamental, challenges to livelihoods of island peoples. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that these challenges must be better understood before effective and sustainable adaptation is possible.

Understanding past livelihood impacts from climate change can help design and operationalize future interventions. In addition, globalization has had uneven effects on island countries/jurisdictions, producing situations especially in archipelagoes where there are significant differences between core and peripheral communities. This approach overcomes the problems that have characterized many recent interventions for climate-change adaptation in island contexts which have resulted in uneven and at best only marginal livelihood improvements in preparedness for future climate change.

Island contexts have a range of unique vulnerability and resilience characteristics that help explain recent and proposed responses to climate change. These include the sensitivity of coastal fringes to climate-environmental changes: and in island societies, the comparatively high degrees of social coherence, closeness to nature and spirituality that are uncommon in western contexts.

Enhanced understanding of island environmental and social contexts, as well as insights from past climate impacts and peripherality, all contribute to more effective and sustainable future interventions for adaptation.

The need for more effective and sustainable adaptation in island contexts is becoming ever more exigent as the pace of twenty-first-century climate change increases.

This paper investigates the motivations and practice of nonfinancial firms with regard to using options in their risk management activities.

The paper provides a comprehensive account of the existing empirical evidence and analyzes data on the use of derivatives in general and options in particular by nonfinancial corporations across different underlyings and countries.

Overall, a significant number of 15‐25 per cent of the firms outside the financial sector use options. This reflects the fact that options are very versatile risk management instruments that can be used to hedge various types of exposures, linear as well as nonlinear. In particular, options are a useful component of corporate risk management if exposures are uncertain, e.g. due to price and quantity risk. Depending on the correlation between price and quantity risk, the optimal hedge portfolio consists of a varying combination of linear and nonlinear risk management instruments. Moreover, the accounting treatment as well as liquidity effects can impact the choice of derivative. At the same time, there may be agency‐related incentives to use options because of their role to present dual bets on both direction as well as future volatility of the underlying.

The findings are important with regards to assessing whether the full potential of derivative financial instruments is being realized, since not all firms use these instruments and not all of them use all types and, more importantly, whether they are used appropriately.

The paper provides an up‐to‐date analysis of the motivations for nonfinancial firms to use financial derivatives in general and options in particular as well as comprehensively characterizes the extent of their use in practice.