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In this chapter we discuss model selection and predictive accuracy tests in the context of parameter and model uncertainty under recursive and rolling estimation schemes. We begin by summarizing some recent theoretical findings, with particular emphasis on the construction of valid bootstrap procedures for calculating the impact of parameter estimation error. We then discuss the Corradi and Swanson (2002) (CS) test of (non)linear out-of-sample Granger causality. Thereafter, we carry out a series of Monte Carlo experiments examining the properties of the CS and a variety of other related predictive accuracy and model selection type tests. Finally, we present the results of an empirical investigation of the marginal predictive content of money for income, in the spirit of Stock and Watson (1989), Swanson (1998) and Amato and Swanson (2001).

The 13 chapters in this volume concern research and theories on 18th to 21st century gender-related issues by 19th and 21st century writers. Our volume looks backward and forward, advancing both research on gender and research on the history of sociology. Gender research is, like many of the subjects discussed in these chapters, post-discipline and post-modern. Our authors include students, mid-career, senior, and emeriti faculty members. While most identify their fields as sociology or sociology and anthropology, one is also a practicing attorney and another is a professor of English. In addition to the United States, authors come from Brazil, Finland, Israel, Italy, and Poland and their subject matter brings additional countries to the mix. They cover a broad spectrum of subjects and events from the Salem Witch Trials and the Crimean War to contemporary national and international politics and policies in such diverse settings as the European Union, Brazilian race tracks, and Israeli Rabbinical Courts. Yet they overlap and expand on each other in many, often surprising, ways.

Is medically assisted fertilization (with the use of in vitro technology) about “reproductive rights” or about white women's privileges? What is “choice” for white and rich women seems to become a further commodification of the body for women of color and economically disadvantaged women.

Several feminists define reproductive rights by demanding social justice and a type of support for the mothers that does not include expensive technologies, which have a problematic outcome, that of generating a divide between women in the north and women in the south of the world. Some authors also talk about a “division of labor” in reproduction.

The first part of my chapter offers an outline of the historical feminist debate over gender and technology, looking at different positions regarding biotechnologies, and reproductive technologies in a specific way. The second part presents an investigation around the (often racialized) international market of eggs and surrogate mothers in the United States, India and Eastern Europe.

The third part consists of an analysis of few recent studies about the health of women who undergo ovarian hyper-stimulation in order to give eggs as “donation” (under payment); women who offer themselves as surrogate mothers and the children who have been conceived with in vitro fertilization, specifically with heterologue forms (egg donation or surrogate motherhood).