This study examines whether homeownership has a trade-off relationship with public-pension development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Relying on a comparative historical approach, we find that while the three governments pursued homeownership societies, their interventions in housing provision and distribution varied in timing and intensity, contributing to different levels of homeownership. Historically, middle-class families in these countries have preferred asset accumulation through home purchases over reliance on public pensions. In particular, the early introduction of mandatory savings as a form of lump-sum retirement payments, combined with widespread homeownership aspirations, led to heavy reliance on private homeownership and, in turn, contributed to establishing underdeveloped, small-scale public-pension systems. Homeownership is unlikely to serve as a cornerstone of old-age economic security systems in East Asia, where asset-based welfare developed as a substitute for collective welfare provision and social rights.

This paper investigates the effects on consumer welfare of changing food-at-home (FAH) and food-away-from-home (FAFH) prices in a period that witnessed two major economic shocks: the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent abnormal inflation. Even though FAFH prices increased more than FAH during this period, we find that FAH price increases have led to more significant and volatile welfare losses compared to changes in FAFH prices. The article makes two contributions to the literature. First, using a complete demand system that is comprised of nine expenditure categories, including FAH, FAFH, and seven other broad non-food aggregates, we estimate the household welfare losses in consumer surplus from changing prices of FAH and FAFH incorporating the own- and cross-price effects. Our findings reveal that own-price effects dominate welfare losses with negligible cross effects, resulting in 11.2% and 7% losses in consumer welfare from FAH and FAFH price increases, respectively, as a percentage of total food spending after the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the dominance of the own price effects suggests that the easier-to-estimate conditional demand systems (foods only) may be sufficient for conducting welfare analysis of changes in food prices.

US cattle producers face volatile prices due to cattle cycles, drought, and unexpected market shocks. USDA-RMA offers subsidized insurance programs like Livestock Risk Protection (LRP) to mitigate output risks, yet participation remains limited. Using a 21-year state-level panel and a two-part econometric model, this paper evaluates how risk management education workshops influence LRP utilization among feeder cattle producers. Results indicate that education workshops increase the likelihood of insurance participation, especially in non-pilot states, while subsidies dominate in pilot states. The marginal effect of education is smaller in higher subsidy environments, suggesting substitution between education and subsidy.

Meaningful work is a central determinant of employee well-being, motivation, and performance, yet little is known about how abusive supervision undermines employees’ experience of meaningful work, particularly across hybrid/remote and office-based contexts. Adopting a resource-based perspective, this study examines how abusive supervision relates to meaningful work among hybrid/remote and in-office employees via reducing three key resources: autonomy, self-efficacy, and belongingness. Using cross-sectional survey data from 512 employees in Spain and Portugal, we tested a parallel mediation model comparing hybrid and in-office workers. Although abusive supervision did not directly relate to meaningful work in either group, it strongly reduced the three key psychological resources, which significantly reduced meaningful work. All mediational pathways were significant for both groups; however, indirect relationships were consistently stronger among hybrid workers. These findings suggest that hybrid/remote working employees are more vulnerable to abusive supervision due to heightened dependence on supervisors in contexts characterized by physical distance.

In 2019, the 33rd International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent adopted the landmark Resolution 2 on “Addressing the Mental Health and Psychosocial Needs of People Affected by Armed Conflicts, Natural Disasters and Other Emergencies”. By examining Resolution 2’s origin and the time and context in which it was adopted, and by analyzing its normative influence on subsequent international instruments adopted by States, this article explores how Resolution 2 has contributed to advancing and establishing norms and standards for responding to the mental health and psychosocial needs of people affected by armed conflicts and other emergencies.

Scholarship on fascism during interwar China has hitherto focused on the ‘Blue Shirt Society’ and the ‘CC Clique’, two Guomindang (GMD) right-wing cliques loyal to their patron Chiang Kai-shek. So far the Generalissimo’s own perceptions and agendas with fascism have been shrouded in myth, probably due to his evasive attitude and the availability of sources. Scholars dealing with the topic have also tended to delineate a peculiar variant of ‘Chinese Fascism’ by drawing on various theories of fascism. This article proposes an alternative approach inspired by transnational fascism—rather than seeing it as an analytical tool, it treats fascism as a highly malleable concept. Focusing on Chiang Kai-shek, the article historicizes his evolving engagements (perception, interaction, appropriation, etc.) with the idea during the Nanjing Decade by diving into critical primary sources, in particular the Diplomatic and Historical Archives of Foreign Ministry in Rome (ASDMAE), the Chiang Kai-shek Archives at Academia Historica (Guoshiguan) in Taipei, Chiang’s diary and writings, among others. It shows that rather than a fixed view, Chiang’s engagements with the idea during the period underwent a process of changes as situation and relevance of fascism evolved. It thus intends to contribute to the topic both empirically and methodologically.

This paper offers the first detailed examination of riverine depositional practice in the Roman Middle Thames, using a comprehensive, multi-period dataset of river finds. The study reveals an abrupt deviation from long-standing martial traditions, replaced largely by low-value coinage and coarse-ware pottery. Comparative analysis of two crossing sites, the urban Kingston bridge and the rural Goring ford, demonstrates that deposition was a highly structured, likely intentional practice. It is argued that this change reflects Imperial influence and ‘soft control’, alongside the conscious adoption of new material proxies to maintain the role of ritual deposition within the new socio-political landscape.

Biodesign projects often stall between promising material prototypes—bacterial cellulose textiles, mycelium composites, algae-derived materials—and scalable, economically viable production systems. This gap emerges from fragmented decision-making across material design, cultivation processes, and techno-economic evaluation, since each domain operates with distinct metrics, vocabularies, and decision thresholds—making cross-domain reasoning difficult to formalize and transfer. We present agents.design.bio, a decision-support framework that enables students, designers, educators, and founders to engage interdisciplinary expertise through structured reasoning. The platform offers a unified conversational interface in which users interact with domainspecific agents: Designer (@designer), Farmer (@farmer), and CFO (@cfo). Together, they operate on a shared knowledge base, manufacturing datasets, and techno-economic models. Rather than generating speculative ideas, the agents evaluate user-defined scenarios and highlight trade-offs, sensitivities, and risks—making cross-domain dependencies explicit and testable. The demonstration walks through four phases— material evaluation, process optimization, scale-up stress testing, and trade-off analysis—reframing scale-up as a structured learning process rather than a late-stage financial constraint.

This study explores the potential of mycelium as a biofabricated coating for textiles through an interdisciplinary collaboration between designers and scientists. The research begins with exploratory biotinkering, investigating mycelium as a textile coating to understand how textile substrates can function as bioreceptive surfaces for living organisms. Building on these initial observations, interdisciplinary collaborations were activated to further refine the experimental process and to test selected properties of the mycelium-based bio-coating, including abrasion resistance and wetting behaviour. The results demonstrate that mycelium can act as a transformative agent as textile coating, influencing both material performance and enabling new aesthetic expressions grounded in biological growth processes, opening

Voters of government parties are systematically more satisfied with democracy than supporters of opposition parties. The dynamics of this winner-loser gap are typically studied in the context of elections. However, it is not clear how changes in government composition that occur without elections midway through an electoral cycle, and that change voters’ winner/loser status, influence satisfaction with democracy. We address this question by examining an unexpected government change in Estonia in 2016, which interrupted the European Social Survey data collection (Round 8). The largest party in a three-party coalition government was replaced by the largest opposition party midway through the 2015–2019 electoral cycle while all other parties retained their government or opposition status. These circumstances enabled us to examine the effect of winning and losing without elections using fixed effects models, including a difference-in-differences design. The results provide suggestive but fragile evidence that losing government status might reduce satisfaction with democracy, whereas the effect of winning is modest at best and statistically inconclusive. Where effects emerge, they do so with a lag of approximately six weeks, coinciding with the implementation of a major tax reform – consistent with policy-based considerations rather than by immediate affective responses.

This review essay considers the history of free and unfree Chinese labor through books on the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, Chinese indentured labor in the Dutch East Indies, Chinese American migration and community formation in the U.S. heartland, and the global politics of the gold rushes.

Biodesign education increasingly seeks to integrate design practice with the life sciences through interdisciplinary, hands-on approaches. However, few teaching models show how living-material prototyping can be embedded across studio-based design education and biosafety-level laboratory environments. This paper presents Living Pigments, a pedagogical framework developed in the first year of a two-year biodesign master programme. The unit introduces algae-based prototyping through a design-led approach that emphasises experimentation, collaboration, and ethical engagement. Through lectures, laboratory workshops, biofabrication sessions, and studio tutorials, students learn to cultivate and design with pigment-producing algae as active collaborators rather than inert materials. Informed by Ron Wakkary’s concept of designing-with, the framework foregrounds non-human agency, care, maintenance, and uncertainty. Drawing on selected student case studies, the paper demonstrates how algae-based prototyping supports interdisciplinary thinking, technical confidence, and reflective practice, offering a practice-based model that bridges studio and laboratory learning in biodesign education.

This article examines the activism of far-right women who, beginning in the late 1970s, produced the magazine Eowyn. It reconstructs the foundational principles of far-right feminist thought in Italy, which these women self-identified as personalising feminism, situating this framework within the broader currents of contemporary feminist discourse and its cultural referents. The essay further explores the reception of Eowyn by Marxist feminists and far-right male actors, illuminating the tensions and dialogues that shaped the movement. A distinct feminist typology emerges – one that neither repudiates an organicist conception of society nor reduces women’s history to narratives of oppression, while remaining sensitive to the risks of the massification and masculinisation of the female figure. This approach advocates for women’s equal opportunities while offering a sustained critique of a society and state perceived as retrograde, highlighting the complex intersections of gender, ideology, and political culture in late twentieth-century Italy.

One of the most significant achievements of equilibrium logic was the characterization of strong equivalence, a property crucial for program transformation and optimization in answer set programming (ASP). While ASP has recently been extended to a higher-order setting to enhance its expressive power, the lack of a comparable purely logical foundation has made verifying strong equivalence for higher-order programs or even proving the correctness of simple program transformations, a difficult challenge. This paper addresses this gap by developing a logical semantics for higher-order ASP by extending the equilibrium logic framework. Within this extended framework, we demonstrate that every stratified higher-order logic program possesses a unique equilibrium model. Moreover, we establish definability results demonstrating that the syntax of our higher-order language is sufficiently expressive to capture its semantic domains. Finally, and most importantly, we generalize the classical theorem of strong equivalence to the higher-order setting: we prove that two programs are strongly equivalent if and only if they share the same higher-order models.