This chapter introduces fiscal policy in a broad way. Starting from a canonical real business cycle model, the chapter shows by example how to incorporate government expenditure, taxation, and debt into the model. Since these policy frictions affect the behavior of the representative household or the representative firm, they are important tools that help macroeconomists understand the role of fiscal policy over business cycle fluctuations.

In lieu of a traditional introduction, the editors elected to invite leading scholars to open the volume with a roundtable, inviting discussion and debate over the value, limits, and contributions of war and society studies to understanding the American experience of war. In a robust conversation prompted by questions from the editors, these prominent scholars tackled the question at the very heart of the volume—what defines the study of war and society? Their conversation is followed by commentary from a scholar who offers a counterpoint from the vantage point of military history. The introduction closes with some concluding thoughts from the editors and a roadmap for the volume that follows. The volume’s subsequent essays grapple, explicitly or implicitly, with the ideas laid out in the opening roundtable. The authors collectively aim to help define and elevate the field of war and society by showcasing its approaches, its promise, its sensitivities, and its possibilities. The volume overall stands as a collaborative declaration of the ambitions, character, and future of the field of war and society.

Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, this chapter examines how processes of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization give rise to various collective action problems and how firms address these problems. Drawing on stakeholder theory in management studies, the chapter distinguishes three governance models – the hub-and-spoke model, the lead role governance model, and the shared governance model – each offering different solutions to these challenges. A case study of the famous Czech firm Bat’a Enterprises in the early twentieth century demonstrates the practical application of the lead role governance model, which grants employees high autonomy while maintaining management’s central role in strategic decisions. Through profit-sharing schemes, decentralized workshops, and internal education, Bat’a effectively aligned individual incentives with the firm’s goals, mitigating collective action problems and fostering innovation. By analyzing Bat’a’s success, this chapter contributes to the understanding of knowledge governance in firms and underscores the connections with the GKC framework and Ostrom’s design principles.

This chapter tests the proposed “perception versus delusion” framework across a broad swath of the Institutes, tracing how familiar doctrinal loci – including faith, illumination, union with Christ, the law, justification, and predestination – gain new coherence within an itinerary of perceptual rehabilitation. The result is a composite picture of how Calvin’s God choreographs accommodations, supernatural help, and even human interventions like doctrine to enable fallen humans to approximate the perceptual ideal of spectatorship unto piety outlined in Chapter 2, but to do so under the conditions of imaginative dysfunction described in Chapter 3.

The chapter illustrates what business cycle fluctuations look like in the United States. It shows real-world data to identify what Lucas calls economic variable co-movements, which are the key properties of the data that economic models should replicate.

The first section examines L2 acquisition of Chinese aspect markers -le, -guo, -zhe, and zai, in relation to both the Aspect Hypothesis and their linguistic features. The examination provides insights into how L2 learners acquire and interpret these markers, highlighting challenges that L2 learners have in acquiring the complexities and subtleties of Chinese aspectual systems. The second section looks at distinctions between unaccusative and unergative verbs in L2 Chinese, and it reveals that English speakers erroneously allow the argument of the unergative verb and the definite argument NP of the unaccusative verb to occur postverbally, suggesting that the syntactic structures for their L2 Chinese intransitive verbs are not properly regulated by lexical semantics. Also discussed is the absence in L2 Chinese of the so-called overpassivisation of unaccusative verbs frequently found in L2 English. The third section scrutinises theta-role reassembly in L2 Chinese resultative and double-object constructions. It finds that English speakers, even at advanced levels, have difficulty with Chinese resultative sentences which have theta-role configurations different from those in their L1. L1 influence is also found in English and Spanish speakers’ theta-role reconfigurations in their L2 Chinese double-object constructions.

Jamil Scott places 2024 election outcomes in the context of the history of Black women in US electoral politics. She begins by evaluating the trends in Black women’s representation across levels of office, including changes as a result of the most recent election. Scott then describes Black women’s relationship with the Democratic Party, explaining how Black women’s support to the party has not been reciprocated in party support of Black women’s leadership or in prioritization of their policy concerns. She analyzes gender differences in voting behavior among Black voters, as well as generational differences among Black women voters, with particular attention to the 2024 election. Scott concludes her chapter by offering both historical and contemporary evidence of Black women’s crucial role in the fight for democracy. She argues that Black women will continue this fight but questions whether they will look to gender-based coalitions as a fruitful site for engagement.

This chapter first examines L2 learners’ processing of Chinese base-generated topics, which is found to be syntactically induced, contrary to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis. The chapter also delves into the availability of subject-orientation of the null subject in matrix clauses in L2 Chinese, demonstrating L2 learners’ difficulty in obligatorily referring the null subject back to the subject of the preceding adverbial clause. This is accounted for by Cunning’s Cue-Based Model as well as L1 influence. Also scrutinised are reference resolutions of phonetically (un)realised arguments in L2 Chinese complement and adverbial clauses, showing that asymmetric reference resolutions of empty subjects vs. empty objects and overt object pronouns vs. null objects pose challenges to L2 Chinese learners. The chapter then explores operations involved in VP-, TP-, and ƩP-ellipsis in L2 Chinese, demonstrating the difficulty that learners have in acquiring these complicated operations in their L2 Chinese grammars. Absence of L1 transfer at beginner levels is observed in some of these elliptical operations, which is considered a possible result of a breakdown at the syntax–stylistic interface or beginner learners’ inability to implement these necessary syntactic operations.

This chapter introduces a weaker type of lift, called a pseudo-commuting contractive lift, which paves the way for an appropriate parallel of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias model theory for the bivariate setting. Embedded inside a pseudo-commuting contractive lift of a commuting contractive pair is a minimal Sz.-Nagy–Foias isometric lift of the product of components of the commuting contractive pair. The uniqueness of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias isometric lift is then exploited to argue that any two pseudo-commuting contractive lifts are unitarily equivalent. Arguably, the pseudo-commuting contractive lifts for a commuting contractive pair provide a better parallel to the Sz.-Nagy–Foias isometric lifts for a single contraction operator.

If we take commons to be a kind of institutional arrangement enabling community governance of shared resources, the challenge involved in taking the corporation-as-commons idea forward is to specify what we mean by corporation in this context. We also need to determine who shares the corporation and identify the rules and practices that enable its provision, production, and reproduction in relevant action arenas. This chapter is an attempt to chart this course. Drawing on insights from the literature on the firm, it argues that the firm’s most critical resource is its "corporate mask," a special kind of institutional resource provided by the legal system that enables the firm’s members to operate as a singular actor in the legal and commercial spheres. But the corporate mask is not merely a legal construct – the social recognition of the firm as a corporate actor, a reliable business partner, a reputable producer of goods or services, and so on matter a great deal as well. The corporate mask is a legal and epistemic focal point shared by insiders and third parties with whom the firm contracts and more generally interacts in a network of adjacent action situations.