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The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand, colonial governments experimented with other ways to anchor their paper monies to real values in the economy. These mechanisms included tax-redemption, land-backed loans, sinking funds, interest-bearing notes, and legal tender laws. I assess and explain the structure and performance of these mechanisms. This was monetary experimentation on a grand scale.

“In every generation, each person must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” This prescription of the Haggadah promises that there is a way of reading and speaking about Exodus that allows one to embellish old stories and to make them new in order to re-energize the ideal of biblical redemption, making it relevant to our everyday lives.

Redemption in the Exodus narrative can be read not only as a historical record of ancient events, but can also be understood as creating a counter-culture of hope when all that has been experienced until now is one of pure necessity. Redemption, in this view, is an ongoing, everyday activity. It is creating islands of stability in a seemingly meaningless and unresponsive universe.

In this article, I identify and explores several rabbinic conceptions of everyday redemption including 1-mirror play, 2-deep dialogue, and 3-and the institutionalization of Torah study. The article also briefly discusses the inherent and dangerous temptation of overreaching and demanding an otherworldly redemption (Redemption with a capital R) in the here and now. The article concludes with a description of some practical contemporary examples of everyday redemption in business.

In this article we consider how cultural resources rooted in religion help to constitute and animate people working in industrialized societies across both religious and nonreligious domains. We argue that redemptive self-narratives figure prominently in the symbolic constructions people attach to their experiences across the many domains of human experience; such redemptive narratives not only can shape their identities and sense of life purpose, they inform their practices and choices and animate their capacity for action. To consider how redemptive self-narratives can provide a basis for agency in organizations, we analyze and compare the career narratives of a retired Episcopal Bishop and a celebrated CEO.

The potential for a ‘narrative turn’ in victimology carries with it all kinds of possibilities and problems in adding nuanced understandings smoothed out and sometimes erased from the vision of victimhood provided by criminal victimisation data. In this chapter, we explore the methodological and theoretical questions posed by such a narrative turn by presenting the case of June: a mother bereaved by gun violence that unfolded in Manchester two decades ago. Excavated using in-depth biographical interviewing, June told the story of the loss of her son, the role of faith in dealing with the aftermath of violence and eventually, how this story became a source for change for the community in which it was read and heard. June's story provided an impetus for establishing a grassroots antiviolence organisation and continued to be the driver for that same group long after the issue it was formed to address had become less problematic. As a story it served different purposes for the individual concerned, for the group they were a part of and for the wider community in which the group emerged. However, this particular story also raises questions for victimology in its understanding of the role of voice in policy and concerning the nature of evidence for both policy and the discipline itself. This chapter considers what lessons narrative victimology might learn from narrative criminology, the overlaps that the stories of victims and offenders might share and what the implications these might have for understanding what it means to be harmed.

Inefficiencies in the fiscal and monetary systems of the Ottoman Empire led to a higher debt burden over time and the bankruptcy for the Ottoman state in 1875. To deal with these inefficiencies, reforms were implemented: supervisory organizations were established and the gold standard was adopted. How did investors at the Istanbul Bourse view these reforms? We manually collected data on the price of Ottoman government bonds on the Bourse from 1873 to 1883. Using the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) methodology, we identify short-run and permanent changes in volatility of bond returns subsequent to the reforms. Our results suggest investors responded positively, by accepting lower yield premia, to adoption of the gold standard, and foundation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration which had European sponsors, but did not respond positively to reforms that relied on purely local institutions.

In order to emphasize in-depth analyses of individual life stories, seven informants were selected. Since breadth of experience will contribute to a more detailed contextualization of the consumer's use of products in identity negotiation, diversity across informants was emphasized. Interviews generally followed the format as suggested by Thompson, Locander, and Pollio (1989). A comfortable setting was chosen and pseudonyms were used to ensure anonymity. Interviews were audio-taped and lasted anywhere from one to just over two hours. Grand tour questions (McCracken, 1988) focused on the meaning of the tattoo design, the experience of being tattooed, perceptions of the body, words the informants used to describe themselves, and other biographical information important for understanding the informant's personal myth. Every effort was made to present a natural front, keep the informant on track without being too directive, demonstrate active listening, and prompt the informant as a way of probing for details (Spradley, 1979). To ensure accuracy, an experienced and trained transcriptionist transcribed each of the seven interviews. The final text totaled 450 typed double-spaced pages.

The main purpose of this chapter is to estimate a model for hedge fund returns that will endogenously generate failure probabilities using panel data where sample attrition due to fund failures is a dominant feature. We use the Lipper (TASS) hedge fund database, which includes all live and defunct hedge funds over the period January 1994 through March 2009, to estimate failure probabilities for hedge funds. Our results show that hedge fund failure prediction can be substantially improved by accounting for selectivity bias caused by censoring in the sample. After controlling for failure risk, we find that capital flow, lockup period, redemption notice period, and fund age are significant factors in explaining hedge fund returns. We also show that for an average hedge fund, failure risk increases substantially with age. Surprisingly, a 5-year-old fund on average has only a 65% survival rate.

Stock Participation Accreting Redemption Quarterly-pay Securities (SPARQS), a service mark of Morgan Stanley, represent another form of equity-linked structured notes. The SPARQS generally provide the investors with higher interest payments that substantially exceed the market interest rate for corresponding standard bonds, in exchange for a call feature. The call option limits the potential appreciation of the SPARQS in case the underlying common stock price rises. Moreover, the SPARQS are mandatorily convertible at maturity that entail more risk than ordinary debts due to the possibility that investors might not receive their principal amount in case the underlying common stock price declines. This paper derives a general pricing formula for the SPARQS using the binomial tree approach. An empirical test of a specific SPARQS issue indicates that the binomial tree model is quite accurate.