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Domestic debt restructurings (DDRs) are monetary events as much as fiscal ones, yet the monetary policy stance around them has not been measured directly. This paper estimates—for Jamaica (2010), Ghana (2022–24), and Barbados (2018–19)—how far each central bank departed from its own implicit reaction function around the exchange, using a regime-appropriate measure in each case. Four findings hold across different regimes. First, no central bank was passive: in each case the largest departure in the sample, or close to it, falls inside the restructuring episode. Second, what each did was governed by its regime rather than by a common disposition—the two floating rate cases ran looser than their rules implied, while Barbados, defending a peg with a few weeks of import cover, withdrew financing from the government. Third, the departure attaches to the announcement rather than to the execution of the exchange, and it does not persist: the more tightly constrained the central bank, the shorter it proves. Finally, using a money multiplier equation, the study finds no evidence that any of the three exchanges impaired monetary transmission. Three recommendations for DDR design and monitoring follow.

Genome editing holds transformative potential for curing human disease. However, achieving safe and effective in vivo genome editing requires further preclinical studies, to minimize risks such as genotoxicity, cytotoxicity, and immunogenicity. Unlike traditional therapies, genome editing involves irreversible DNA alterations, presenting unique challenges. This definitive and species-specific intervention necessitates additional drug development steps, ideally through human tissue models that recapitulate human-specific responses. The kidney is a predominant site for off-target effects of systemic therapies, owing to high blood flow and its concentration of exogenous factors. However, there are currently no established human models for assessing gene therapies. Here, we leverage kidney organoids as a pre-clinical testing platform for CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing via adenoassociated virus (AAV) delivery, a common strategy in clinical trials that have raised safety concerns due to supraphysiologic viral titers met with toxicity. Kidney organoids enabled the assessment of AAV tropism, revealing high transduction efficiency of AAV2 to tubules. AAV transduction, however, drove a nephrotoxic response of tubular genotoxicity, cytotoxicity, and immunogenicity. Notably, tubular injury activated IL-1β and the canonical NFκB pathway, and its targeted inhibition with bardoxolone prevented the fibrotic loss of nephrons and tubular senescence. Our findings highlight the potential of kidney organoids as a preclinical platform for gene therapeutic products, which could inform clinical trials to minimize organ failures and death in patients

Erasmus published many books with the press of Johann Froben in Basel starting in 1514. I focus here on the imprints of the first two years of their partnership and ponder why so many of these books were composite—that is, containing multiple texts authored by one or more people. I identify three main motives for these composite books: an intellectual motive to highlight similarities between the different texts included; a practical motive to meet and/or create a minimum respectable size for a learned book; and a commercial motive to differentiate a new edition from a recent one published by another press by including supplementary material in order to avoid accusations of directly undercutting a confrere’s profit and to justify a new edition to buyers. A focus on the original publications is crucial to reconstructing these composite books since modern editions of Erasmus’s works generally do not include or mention the other items with which his work was printed.

Under a fixed 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) timing rule aligned with U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) valuation practice, we test whether broader public information improves next-day Bitcoin forecasts and costed implementation outcomes relative to Bitcoin-only benchmarks. A Full Logit-Lasso direction model does not beat Bitcoin (BTC)-only Logit on unconditional probability loss (Brier, log loss), but conditional on the model’s activation threshold (τ = 0.55) it identifies a 26% subset of dates with mean next-day BTC return 72 basis points above non-activated dates (heteroskedasticity- and autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) p = 0.0001). Volatility model rankings are loss-dependent (Ridge on point errors; heterogeneous autoregressive ordinary least squares (HAR-OLS) on quasi-likelihood loss (QLIKE)). Carrying the direction and volatility forecasts into a dual decision rule that combines direction-based gating with volatility-targeted sizing produces a point-estimate net-Sharpe cluster of approximately 1.55 to 1.61 and compresses maximum drawdown from –0.67 for buy-and-hold to approximately –0.10 across the three Full Logit-Lasso dual variants on the 1,450-date realized-return panel. Family-wise inference on these two performance dimensions, conducted as parallel stationary-block-bootstrap stepdown maxT procedures over the paper’s fixed nine contrast reduced family, yields materially different conclusions. Sharpedifference inference does not separate any active rule from buy-and-hold or from direction gating; the closest contrasts sit at padj ≈ 0.063 to 0.066, and the incremental Sharpe contribution of adding volatility sizing on top of direction gating is approximately zero (padj ≈ 0.92). Maximum-drawdown-difference inference, by contrast, separates all nine reduced-family contrasts at padj ≤ 0.003: direction gating, volatility sizing alone, sizing over gating, and the full dual policy all reduce drawdown under the same multiplicity discipline. A conservative T−1 observability audit attenuates richer-model magnitudes but does not overturn the benchmark-first forecast conclusions or the qualitative pattern of family-wise drawdown separation. The paper’s contribution is therefore methodological as well as substantive: once timing, implementation costs, and multiplicity are treated as binding constraints, the economic value of the dual policy in this sample is concentrated in path-risk compression rather than in family-wise Sharpe separation.

Social innovations are at risk at a time when surprise is employed as a unilateral government strategy in order to shrink and refocus government operations. Social innovations involve collective efforts, frequently spanning public and private stakeholders. The needed trust and reciprocal understandings are undercut when government employs the logic of reengineering combined with surprise as a strategy— what we term “Surprise by Design.” This contrasts with past federal restructuring initiatives that employed a mix of administrative expertise (top down) and frontline continuous improvement (bottom up) as strategies for negotiated changes. Surprise is a particular type of top- down imposed change, which disrupts patterned roles and routines in order to impose a reconceptualization of how government will function in society. This article documents surprise as a change strategy and identifies needed adjustments to two relevant lateral models for negotiated change. By taking this into account, social innovation initiatives can be more resilient in the face of Surprise by Design.