This chapter assesses the increasingly public debates of radical pro-market liberals intent on dismantling the totalitarian system, contrasted with the more discreet reform efforts of a liberal minority of economists in the Communist Party advocating for state-led transformation. Both camps drew on international models of development and economic transition, yet both remained largely sidelined from concrete policymaking until the Soviet Union’s collapse. The chapter spotlights the contributions of figures such as pro-market government advisor Stanislav Shatalin and economic journalist Vasily Selyunin, illustrating the interplay of ideas and political constraints that defined reform discourse in the 1980s. A comparison of Perestroika’s economic programme with the parallel market reforms in China refutes the popular notion that Russia could have successfully taken a similar path of transition.

The fifth chapter, offering reflections on Jewish as well as Muslim protagonists, expands to deliver a fresh account of Jewish and Muslim lives today. Living in “postmigrant” Germany, today’s Jewish and Muslim identities, as depicted in contemporary narratives by Olga Grjasnowa, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Kat Kaufmann, and Deborah Feldman, are no longer shaped by either binary gender identity or clearly defined categories of Muslim, Jewish, or other ethnic origins. Many of these newer texts display highly innovative language and style, as well as characters who transcend or fuse multiple boundaries at the same time. “Polysingularity” emerges as a new category for defining Jewish as well as Muslim characters’ migratory experiences. “Identity” seems to be a less fruitful classification now, since both Jewish and Muslim individuals in the most recent texts are presenting as never fixed, always fluid, in transition. This chapter concludes with an exploration of the category of postmigration, probing to what extent Jewish identity still figures meaningfully in conversations on the future of Holocaust memory and antisemitism in the twenty-first century.

This chapter introduces the canonical real business cycle model, understood as an infinite-horizon economy in which the representative household derives utility from consumption and leisure and the representative firm uses capital and labor to produce output -- and output is subject to stochastic productivity shocks. This model is the basic building block of models with real frictions -- those that abstain from nominal (monetary) rigidities. In a second step, the chapter complements the exposition by introducing the indivisible labor model of Hansen.

The writing of this book, planning its structure, shaping its content, investigating details, have been an Odyssey for its author. The journey has been an exciting one, for it is always exciting and informative to investigate the beginnings and early development of any phenomenon, whether it be of material things or in the world of ideas, and coinage is no exception. The ‘little round things’ that we carry (still, just about) in our purses in some respects resemble their earliest ancestors, not least in their generally round shape and in the images they present to the user. But from the time of their first appearance, coins, and the ways they functioned in the societies in which they moved, have undergone a long history of development and change, and there are many questions posed by aspects of their origins and early use, starting from the fundamental ‘Why coins?’

This chapter explores the genesis of Soviet market economists during the era of stagnation under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. It examines how the hidden economic challenges of the 1970s prompted the spread of proto-liberal ideas among marginal circles of the Russian intelligentsia and Soviet academia. Drawing on debates in mathematical economics, East European reform socialism, and academic exchanges across the Iron Curtain, these groups began to envision alternatives to the prevailing system. The chapter highlights the intellectual journeys of figures such as future economy minister Yevgeny Yasin and liberal dissident Viktor Sokirko, situating their early work within a broader network of reform-minded scholars and underground discussions that quietly challenged the orthodoxies of late Soviet socialism.

To investigate the micro-level interdependence between technological advancements and institutional diversity in IPR within business corporations, this chapter integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework with the Institutional Complementarities (IC) approach. The former recognizes the importance of informal rules and community characteristics in knowledge governance, while the latter reveals inefficiencies arising from the interdependent nature of knowledge ownership and creation. The combined GKC–IC framework reveals the interplay between the characteristics of knowledge as a shared resource and the formal and informal rules governing its production. This offers insights into how corporations can be understood as knowledge commons within today’s environment that is increasingly shaped by the extensive use of IPR in governing knowledge assets. The chapter shows that the interdependence dynamics between IPR and technology excludes knowledge workers from accessing and utilizing the knowledge they produce, leading to the gradual deterioration of their skills and expertise. This vicious cycle further erodes the institutional diversity of corporate knowledge governance in favour of IPR-based governance mechanisms.

A coda explores the diasporic memory by a Turkish German protagonist in Fatma Aydemir’s 2017 novel Ellbogen and by a non-German Turkish migrant in Nazlı Koca’s The Applicant. Structurally, the characters’ experiences resemble those of Jewish protagonists in novels by Salzmann and Grjasnowa, while also addressing Holocaust memory directly, thus bringing into direct conversation different Jewish and Muslim voices. The new project Stolpertexte – modeled on the widely known Stolpersteine memorials – is an example of literature that brings German Jewish Holocaust memory into the present in new media. The presence of those texts in print, online, and podcast forms makes this memory accessible for today’s readers via literature. All these new creations involve stories of migration, bringing past Jewish life to new and future generations.

This chapter reviews important developments in corpus-based research into World Englishes (WE). It provides an overview of types of WE and important resources for corpus-based research into WE. It also touches on the relationship between models of WE and corpus-based modeling of variation in WE. The case study investigates the choice between present perfect (PP) and simple aspect (SP) across a set of first- and second-language varieties of. The PP is of interest because it is an example of stable variation in British and American English and a number of studies have used it to model the relationship of different types of WE. This chapter is the first to use a mixed-model approach to the PP:SP alternation: It fits a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) tree to the data with verb lemma as a random effect. The results show that, in spoken language, there is a clear divide between the first- and second-language varieties investigated, with the latter showing a larger use of PPs. With respect to the random effect, the analysis shows that verbs of change are particularly attracted to the PP and stative verbs are attracted to the SP. Co-occurrence with adverbials is infrequent, overall.