The embodied becoming of autism and childhood: a storytelling methodology

In this article I explore a methodology of storytelling as a means of bringing together research around autism and childhood in a new way, as a site of the embodied becoming of autism and childhood. Through reflection on an ethnographic story of embodiment, the body is explored as a site of knowledge production that contests its dominantly storied subjectivation as a ‘disordered’ child. Storytelling is used to experiment with a line of flight from the autistic-child-research assemblage into new spaces of potential and possibility where the becomings of bodies within the collision of autism and childhood can be celebrated.     

War Leaves an Enduring Legacy in Combatants’ Lives

The memory of combat experience endures in World War II veterans. As veterans age, traumatic memory that previously may have been suppressed in the busyness of family and everyday life can re-emerge. Combat stress may affect not only the veterans, but also those people closely associated with them. Interviews were conducted with World War II veteran aircrew, wives, children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends to examine the impact of combat experience on the veterans and the family across the life course from the perspectives of the various participants. The combat experience significantly affected the life course of most.     

Feeding Patterns and Emotional Care in Breastfed Infants

A number of studies have suggested breastfed infants have improved bonding and attachment or cognitive development outcomes. However, mechanisms by which these differences might develop are poorly understood. We used maternal time use data to examine whether exclusively breastfeeding mothers spend more time in close interactive behaviors with their infants than mothers who have commenced or completed weaning. Mothers (188) participating in a time use survey recorded infant feeding activities for 24 h over a 7 day period using an electronic device. Tracking was conducted at 3, 6, and 9 months postpartum. Data was collected for maternal activities including infant feeding and time spent in emotional care. The mothers of exclusively breastfed infants aged 3–6 months fed them frequently and total time spent in breastfeeding averaged around 17 h a week. Maternal time spent in emotional care was also substantial, and found to correlate positively with time spent breastfeeding. Exclusively breastfed infants received greatest amounts of emotional care from their mother, and exclusively formula fed infants the least. Mixed fed infants received more emotional care time than formula fed infants, but less than fully breastfed infants. These findings may help explain the differential cognitive developmental outcomes reported in the medical literature for breastfed and non breastfed infants.     

Off‐Time Pubertal Timing Predicts Physiological Reactivity to Postpuberty Interpersonal Stress

We investigated associations between retrospectively assessed timing of pubertal development, interpersonal interactions, and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis reactivity to an interpersonal stress task in 110 young adult women. Participants provided salivary cortisol samples at points prior and subsequent to a video‐taped conflict discussion with their romantic partner. Participants also provided subjective global ratings of their discussion on dimensions of conflict and support. For earlier developing girls, higher levels of interpersonal conflict were associated with greater physiological stress in anticipation of the discussion task and less physiological recovery following the discussion. In contrast, for later developing girls, low levels of conflict were associated with greater anticipatory stress and less physiological recovery. These findings have implications for understanding the influence of off‐time pubertal development on the lifetime development of young women.     

Back under the Microscope: Insights from Evidence on Budget Support

This article analyses evidence for each of the expected benefits of budget support in turn, and finds the biggest improvements in the pro‐poor nature of public expenditure and public financial management. More modest improvements are noted in the predictability of aid and the burden of transaction costs, while less is known about the real effects on domestic accountability. Underlying them all is an assessment that programmes are incapable of ‘buying’ reforms. Drawing on the analysis, seven areas are highlighted where budget support design can be strengthened vis‐à‐vis its original rationale.     

Advisers and the Fiduciary Duty Debate

This work concerns itself with the debate taking place in the United States about the duty of care financial advisers owe investors. On one side it is argued that advisers need only concern themselves with recommendations which meet certain suitability standards. On the other side, there are those who argue the suitability standard is not strong enough to adequately protect investor interests. Instead of ensuring investment recommendations are merely suitable, financial advisers owe their investors a fiduciary duty to “act in the best interest of the customer without regard to the financial or other interests … of the investment adviser providing the advice.” (SEC, 2011). In applying a properly understood conception of what fiduciary means I argue that regulations should not be harmonized but that fiduciary duty should apply to all who provide personalized investment advice to retail customers. I will further argue that even if the regulations are harmonized as proposed, because of exemptions for broker‐dealers as envisioned in the proposal, and which currently apply to Registered Investment Advisers, the efficacy of fiduciary duty is diluted to the point of rendering its current application, much less its potential uniform imposition, irrelevant.     

Asymmetric Forecast Densities for U.S. Macroeconomic Variables from a Gaussian Copula Model of Cross-Sectional and Serial Dependence

Most existing reduced-form macroeconomic multivariate time series models employ elliptical disturbances, so that the forecast densities produced are symmetric. In this article, we use a copula model with asymmetric margins to produce forecast densities with the scope for severe departures from symmetry. Empirical and skew t distributions are employed for the margins, and a high-dimensional Gaussian copula is used to jointly capture cross-sectional and (multivariate) serial dependence. The copula parameter matrix is given by the correlation matrix of a latent stationary and Markov vector autoregression (VAR). We show that the likelihood can be evaluated efficiently using the unique partial correlations, and estimate the copula using Bayesian methods. We examine the forecasting performance of the model for four U.S. macroeconomic variables between 1975:Q1 and 2011:Q2 using quarterly real-time data. We find that the point and density forecasts from the copula model are competitive with those from a Bayesian VAR. During the recent recession the forecast densities exhibit substantial asymmetry, avoiding some of the pitfalls of the symmetric forecast densities from the Bayesian VAR. We show that the asymmetries in the predictive distributions of GDP growth and inflation are similar to those found in the probabilistic forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Last, we find that unlike the linear VAR model, our fitted Gaussian copula models exhibit nonlinear dependencies between some macroeconomic variables. This article has online supplementary material.