Kids Talking About Race: Tween‐agers in a Post‐Civil Rights Era

Our research examines how American children understand and talk about how race matters in their everyday lives. We draw on interviews with 44 middle school children who attend schools in an integrated county‐wide system and find that while some use color‐blind rhetoric, most children in our study know that race matters, while they offer alternative accounts for why and how. Some explain race as social inequality, while others offer cultural accounts of racial differences. Our analysis suggests that for white children, gender matters; more girls describe racial inequality than boys. For children of color, class seems to be key, with middle‐class children giving cultural explanations, including negative evaluations of others in their own racial group. We use an intersectionality framework to analyze the alternative and complex narratives children give for their own experiences of race and race relations between peers.     

Armed masculinity,Hindu nationalism and female political participation in India

Male and female bodies as well as societal ideas defining cultural interpretations of masculinities and femininities are potent metaphors for expressing nation. This article examines two cultural expressions of nation and manliness – the Hindu soldier and warrior monk – disseminated by Hindu nationalist organizations in India. These images, among others, emerged from India's experience of British imperialism and are defined by values of martial prowess, muscular strength, a readiness to go to battle and moral fortitude. Men and women both respond to the call of a nationalism glorifying muscular warriors radiating an uncompromising moral resolve to defend their nation (us) against an easily recognizable enemy (them).

This article argues that this masculinized vision of nation carries important implications for women. Women enter this masculine environment through roles such as heroic mother, chaste wife and celibate warrior. Although divergent in their articulation at the grassroots, all three models of female behavior articulate two social themes. One, women's bodies represent national honor and two, this embodiment only works if women are chaste and virtuous. Indian feminists view such feminine activism with suspicion because the considerable empowerment women may derive from Hindu nationalist politics ultimately does not challenge the gendered power imbalances within the patriarchal Hindu family.     

On the independence between two generalized second degree polynomial statistics and their covariance

The condition of independence between two generalized second degree polynomial statistics is worked out in this paper under the assumption that the covariance matrix of the underlying normal distribution may be singular. The covariance between two such forms is also worked out without the assumption of normality. The results are indicated in compact matrix form.     

Combination of multiple scores for nonparametric testing in multivariate linear regression set-up

For the problem of testing absence of x.egression under the p-variate nonparametric linear regression set-up involving m predictors, standard rank test criteria are in the form of a quadratic form in mp linear rank statistics. Different standard tests correspond to different choices of one system of scores for each variable. In this paper we propose two test criteria which are based on simultaneous choice of more than one system of scores for each variable. The criteria are obtained by applying the union-intersection technique in two different ways. It turns out that for either criterion the use of several systems of scores for each variable results in an improvement in the asymptotic power.     

Private Provision of Infrastructure in Emerging Markets: Do Institutions Matter?

Governments in developing countries have encouraged private sector investment to meet the growing demand for infrastructure. According to institutional theory, the role of institutions is paramount in private sector development. A longitudinal dataset of 40 developing economies between 1990 and 2000 is used to test empirically how different institutional structures affect private investment in infrastructure, in particular its volume and frequency. The results indicate that property rights and bureaucratic quality play a significant role in promoting private infrastructure investment. Interestingly, they also suggest that countries with higher levels of corruption attract greater private participation in infrastructure.     

Some observations on the log-change index numbers and their connection with the factorial indexes

The paper makes a few comments on the characterizations of the log-change index numbers, and then builds up a link between the log-change indexes and the factorial indexes (Stuvel's indexes). It is also suggestedinter alia that log-change index numbers tend to ignore the effect of interaction between price and quantity (consumption) on the expenditure, in contrast to what is admitted by the factorial model.     

On the continuity of ethical social welfare orders on infinite utility streams

In this paper we study the extent to which ethical social welfare orders on infinite utility streams can be continuous. For a class of metrics, we show that ethical preferences can be continuous if and only if the continuity requirement is in terms of a metric which satisfies a simplex condition. This condition requires that the distance from the origin to the unit simplex in the space of utility streams be positive. We use this characterization result to establish that the metric used by Svensson (Econometrica 48:1251–1256, 1980) induces the smallest topology for which there exist continuous ethical preferences. We thank an associate editor and two referees of this journal for their comments and suggestions.