Reputational Capital and Academic Pay

This article examines how research productivity, administrative service, and teaching affect reputational capital in the market for academic economists. Also, we investigate the issue of the durability of reputational capital, estimating the penalties associated with gaps in research output. Our results reveal that (1) the market makes a distinction between the quantity and the quality of an individual's research output, (2) a smaller number of frequently cited papers enhances reputational capital more than a greater number of less frequently cited papers, (3) reputational capital does not depreciate rapidly during research breaks, and (4) the market does not discount co-authored papers.     

Desiring the standard light skin: black multiracial boys,masculinity and exotification

Although studies of the multiracial population have long identified the connection between multiraciality and exotification, much of the focus has been on the exotification of multiracial women that are part-white. Consequently, most understandings of exotification in this literature are insufficient to account for how a broader multiracial demographic is exotified and the mechanisms of exotification that are specific to mixed-race bodies. This article analyses black multiracial boys’ experiences of exotification in Northern California. Interviews with the boys revealed how interactions around their multiraciality intimately linked perceptions of their attractiveness to their mixedness. Their physical features, behaviours and dispositions were dissected according to their multiple racial backgrounds in ways that rendered them desirably hybridised. The interaction of black masculinity with their other racialised masculinities is essential to understanding the construction of the black multiracial male as desirable, pointing to the critically important yet understudied intersection of mixedness and masculinity.     

Rethinking runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain,the Caribbean,West Africa and North America

This essay utilises four exceptional case studies to explore the various causes, experiences and results of escape from slavery in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Atlantic World. These are: Johnny Beckles in Barbados, Jamie Montgomery in Scotland, Castle Slaves at Cape Coast Castle on the West African Gold Coast; and Harriet and Beverly Hemings in Virginia. This essay illuminates the diverse forms of enslavement and escape, showing that while some sought escape from slavery and even their race, others sought sanctuary within slave society and even on plantations, while others used escape as a means of pressuring for changes in their lives and work as enslaved people.     

A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR MODELLING WILDLIFE POPULATION DYNAMICS†

This paper proposes a unified framework for defining and fitting stochastic, discrete‐time, discrete‐stage population dynamics models. The biological system is described by a state‐space model, where the true but unknown state of the population is modelled by a state process, and this is linked to survey data by an observation process. All sources of uncertainty in the inputs, including uncertainty about model specification, are readily incorporated. The paper shows how the state process can be represented as a generalization of the standard Leslie or Lefkovitch matrix. By dividing the state process into subprocesses, complex models can be constructed from manageable building blocks. The paper illustrates the approach with a model of the British grey seal metapopulation, using sequential importance sampling with kernel smoothing to fit the model.     

Changes in Preference for Infant‐Directed Speech in Low and Moderate Noise by 4.5‐ to 13‐Month‐Olds

Although a large literature discusses infants' preference for infant‐directed speech (IDS), few studies have examined how this preference might change over time or across listening situations. The work reported here compares infants' preference for IDS while listening in a quiet versus a noisy environment, and across 3 points in development: 4.5 months of age, 9 months of age, and 13 months of age. Several studies have suggested that IDS might help infants to pick out speech in the context of noise (Colombo, Frick, Ryther, Coldren, & Mitchell, 1995; Fernald, 1984; Newman, 2003); this might suggest that infants' preference for IDS would increase in these settings. However, this was not found to be the case; at all 3 ages, infants showed similar advantage (or lack thereof) for IDS as compared to adult‐directed speech when presented in noise versus silence. There was, however, a significant interaction across ages: Infants aged 4.5 months showed an overall preference for IDS, whereas older infants did not, despite listening to the same stimuli. The lack of an effect with older infants replicates and extends recent findings by Hayashi, Tamekawa, and Kiritani (2001), suggesting that the variations in fundamental frequency and affect are not sufficient cues to IDS for older infants.     

'Young Carers' and Disabled Parents: Time for a change of direction?

In less than a decade, children who provide care for ill or disabled parents and siblings have become a major target of social welfare services. 'Young carers' suffer, it is suggested, from a degradation in mental and physical health, have damaged educational careers, restricted social networks, and will suffer long-term consequences in adult life as a result of their childhood caring roles. This paper argues that limited empirical evidence exists for these claims and that, where legitimate concerns arise, they are frequently related to poverty, social exclusion, and unsupported or inadequate parenting, and have no direct relationship to illness or impairment. While dedicated services to young carers have made a valuable contribution in highlighting an important social issue, a radical review of their place in the overall structure of support services for families affected by illness or disability is long overdue.