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We document how inflation expectations evolved in the United States during the fall of 1933 using narrative evidence from historical news accounts and the forecasts of contemporary business analysts. We find that inflation expectations, after rising substantially during the spring of 1933, moderated in the fall in response to mixed messages from the Roosevelt Administration. The narrative accounts and our econometric model connect the dramatic swings in output growth in 1933 – the rapid recovery in the spring and the setback in the fall – to these sudden movements in inflation expectations.

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.

The editorials of the then-new Business Week during the 1929–1933 contraction offered sophisticated Keynesian policy prescriptions: against a laissez-faire response, against deflation, against balanced-budget fetishism, for monetary expansion. These editorials, which seem to have been largely forgotten, likely played a considerable role in the dissemination of Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1930s. This chapter reviews the editorials and their congruence with Keynes’s writings. The magazine’s archives, including surveys of their readers, suggest that the editorials were among the most read and most valued parts of the magazine. The magazine cultivated an elite executive readership at that time, so the editorials may well have been important in gaining business support for Keynesian policies in the early New Deal.

Purpose: This chapter explores the strategic role of human resource development (HRD) as a function of talent management (TM) and discusses how HRD activities can help to facilitate more creative behaviours, in the international hospitality industry.

Approach: We focus on TM and HRD research exploring how these lenses are conceptually positioned given our current knowledge on creativity. We draw on the system-based approach to creativity and reconceptualise the creativity components by levels of flexibility/plasticity and outline how such approaches can help creative practice development.

Findings: We rationalise the existing conceptual approaches to creativity and propose a simplified model considering the developmental aspects of creativity. First, we theorise the TM/HRD strategies, such as training and development via learning, as a mechanism to connect TM/HRD to creativity in the organisational setting. We inform the current literature on whether and how creative processes emerge at work and affect creative flow in the bottom-top and top-bottom directions. Second, we advance the development of creativity theory by reconceptualising the established creativity components by degrees of flexibility/plasticity. Such re-conceptualisation allows for more nuanced examinations of organisational stimuli (i.e. training and development) on developmental conceptions of creativity.

Originality: This is the first piece of work that has investigated the fit between TM/HRD and creativity research. Our conceptual model illustrates that creativity can be promoted and developed at work by incorporating developmental initiatives such as TM/HRD.