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This chapter examines the effect of changes in the public debt–gross domestic product (GDP) ratio on long, 10 year, interest rates in a panel of 17 countries over the period 1870–2016 controlling for other variables, in particular the world interest rate. Over this long period, one can argue that most of the big changes in public debt were the product of factors largely exogenous to national interest rate determination, such as war, depression or financial crisis. The issue is of current relevance since the Covid-19 pandemic has caused large increases in the ratio of public debt to GDP in many countries. The estimates suggest that it is the change in debt, rather than the level of debt or the deficit that matters for long interest rates. World interest rates have long- and short-run effects on interest rates which are very well determined and close to one. Current inflation has a small but significant effect.

Interdisciplinary approaches to doctoral education have been identified as a route towards enhancing research capacity to address pressing technical and socio-technological challenges. Increasingly, technological supports for part-time, distance, and flexible access to doctoral programmes are bringing together international groups of supervisors and students. Doctoral programmes in the field of educational technology often include academic staff and doctoral candidates from a fairly wide range of originating undergraduate and graduate disciplines. While technologies provide these diverse, dispersed doctoral students and their supervisors with digital connectivity, theoretical continuity remains a challenge for both new and established contributors to the field. This chapter reports results of a grounded theory informed study of doctoral supervisors’ experiences in dealing with disciplinary issues in educational technology. Resultant supervisory challenges and practices are reported. We posit a conceptual framework for examining perspectives on disciplinarity within educational technology and present an argument that the field provides fertile trans-disciplinary ground for represented disciplines to influence and potentially be reoriented by others. Trans-disciplinary reorientation provides a promising avenue towards developing shared discourses and theoretical underpinnings for at least broadly uniting the field and could make a substantive contribution to resolving persistent concerns in educational technology doctoral supervision and perhaps beyond.

While well-being and resilience in the workplace continue to be important areas of research, the role age plays in well-being and resilience at work and associated positive work outcomes is often ignored. In most studies age is simply treated as a control variable. In this chapter, we outline the importance of considering age in well-being and resilience research by focusing on how age may impact both of these variables and drawing on research from both the organizational psychology and developmental psychology literature. Theoretical models of these relationships are put forth, and future research directions are discussed.