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The narrative of The Americans weaves together a spy thriller and a family drama, though it drives home the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, Philip and Elizabeth, a couple whose marriage is a cover for their work as Soviet spies. This chapter provides a queer reading of their marriage, drawing from the real history of the Cold War politics of sexuality that associated American values with the hetero- and gender normative, white, and middle-class nuclear family. In contrast, the Soviet Union was understood to have disrupted this natural order by installing the state as an overbearing patriarch. Philip and Elizabeth’s fictional cover as a nuclear family requires them to perform American marriage, family, and selfhood. In doing so, they reflect the centrality of the family in America’s Cold War self-image in which the family serves as the anchor of the American order, enabling economic and political self-sufficiency. Their performance of the family challenges our ability to differentiate between real, authentic family that can serve as the legitimate source of social reproduction and between the counterfeit, fake family that disrupts the social order. The queer family, refusing to be placed beyond realm of the political by the moral language of family values, subverts our ability to distinguish between genres since the family drama is already a political thriller.

This study asks how American institutions of higher education defended the principles of academic freedom (or intellectual autonomy) during the 1950s, even as they became increasingly dependent on the federal government's financial support, their eligibility for which required an oath of political loyalty under the terms of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Universities whose students or professors resisted the oath faced a dilemma of institutional governance as well as intellectual integrity during the early years of the Cold War.

The study draws on documentary and archival sources, including the Congressional Record, the AAUP Bulletin, student pamphlets, newspapers and other publications of the US federal government, and on secondary sources.

The author finds that the US federal government began to invest heavily in higher education during the 1950s, but financial support was often accompanied by political oversight. Higher education institutions and their professors struggled to reconcile a sense of responsibility for national service with a desire for academic freedom. The findings show how the federal government treated institutions of higher education and dealt with the issue of academic freedom during the Cold War.

This study draws on a large pool of primary sources and previous research to offer new insights into an enduring ideological tension between academic freedom, public service and financial patronage.

The purpose of this paper is to use the local correlation technique to measure flight to quality, which is defined as a pronounced and generally rapid increase in risk aversion. Flight to quality between American, British, German, Japanese, and Hong Kong spot equity indices and index futures is examined.

The technique of non‐linear local correlation is employed to detect flight to quality in both spot and futures markets. The use of this methodology allows us to properly process both normally or non‐normally distributed time series. In addition, the estimation of local correlation minimizes the theoretical restrictions resulting from the selection of conditional events and the use of linear regression.

As market risk grows, an increase in flight to quality is documented. For example, a crash in the US stock market results in the flight of capital to the Treasury bond market. Evidence of flight to quality from domestic and foreign spot equity markets to US Treasury bonds is provided. Furthermore, flights to quality from domestic and foreign index futures to US bond futures are revealed. The strength of the reaction from one market to the other is measured and reported. Surprisingly, the authors observe that when market risk becomes extremely high, flight to quality diminishes.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that examines flight to quality in the futures markets by applying local correlation analysis. This study broadens the application of local polynomial regression and local correlation analysis.

This study aims to examine the cross-sectional variation in risk of US-based micro-cap open-end mutual funds. Micro-cap mutual funds allow investors to access very low-priced stocks issued by the smallest of companies. The stock of these firms is usually not traded in major exchanges, and their financial information is not readily available and, thus, regarded as risky investments.

The author examines the cross-sectional variation in risk and higher moments of US-based micro-cap mutual funds in comparison with that of small-cap and mid-cap mutual funds. Total, systematic and idiosyncratic risk metrics, along with higher moments, are estimated before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis.

The author finds that, indeed, based on total and idiosyncratic risk metrics, the sample of micro-cap funds is riskier than the size-matched samples of small-cap and mid-cap funds. The author also reports that the sample of micro-cap funds fail to generate higher excess returns than the less risky small-cap and mid-cap funds.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first time that the risk of small-cap mutual funds has been examined.

Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.

The premise that the U.S. Supreme Court never veers too far off from the dominant national political coalition (Dahl, 1957) has become widely accepted among social scientists today. To fulfill that promise, however, the confirmation process for justices must serve as a plebiscite through which the public can ratify or reject future justices based on their views. Unfortunately, modern confirmation hearings have become an exercise in obfuscation, providing little meaningful dialogue on important issues. Because conservative Republican presidents have made the lion's share of appointments in recent times, social conservatives have most often benefited from a process that has severed the link between Supreme Court nominees and the polity they must serve.

In spite of required state curriculum objectives, American history textbooks often become the de facto curriculum defining history. Self-imposed censorship by textbook publishers defines how individuals, groups, and events are portrayed. A 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report concluded that today’s history textbooks are bland with no voice or storyline and have been sanitized and filled with history rewritten to meet the demands of special interest groups. The report also concluded that while American history textbooks now contain more pages, they include less content. Paradoxically, when a well-crafted textbook is created, students may never have access to it. Efforts by special interest groups to censor such books are not uncommon. A case study of one author’s efforts to have her award-winning history textbook adopted for classroom use and the ensuing censorship efforts by special interest groups are described.

Malice – knowingly doing harm – has been attributed to special education, threatening its continued existence. Malicious education may include inferior education, exclusion from opportunities, miseducation, unnecessary stigmatization, or failure to meet individual needs. Malice may be overt or covert, unselective or selective, or be directed toward those included or those excluded. Attributions of malice may be evaluated by a series of questions comprising a decision model, and this decision model may be applied to attributions of malice to special education. Suggestions that special education is malicious are not confirmed by application of the decision model. False accusations that special education is malicious are derived from inappropriate comparisons, unreasonable expectations, and assertions that are not grounded in realities.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the impact of stock market development on the economic growth for a panel of 27 emerging economies using annual data over the period from 1995 to 2012.

A second-generation panel unit root test developed by Pesaran (2007) has been used to test the stationary properties of the data series. To achieve the study objectives and to mitigate the endogeneity problem that exists in the given model, the authors use a dynamic panel “system GMM” estimator. The authors also use a heterogeneous panel causality test proposed by Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) to examine the direction of causality among the variables.

The empirical findings indicate that stock market development significantly contributes to economic growth. Further, a unidirectional causality running from stock market development to economic growth has been found. This finding is consistent with the supply-leading hypothesis. Besides stock market development, it is also evident that macroeconomic variables, such as investment ratio, trade openness and exchange rates, have significant impact on economic growth.

The findings suggest that a well-functioning stock market, a more globalized economy and increasing aggregate investment can potentially foster the economic growth in those emerging economies.

Unlike other studies, this study constructs three alternate composite indices along with the individual indicators of stock market development and applies robust panel econometric techniques to establish more reliable results.

The purpose of this study is to explore the applicability of the Fama–French and Carhart models on the South African stock market (SASM). It examines the ability of the models to capture size, book-to-market (BM) and momentum effects on the SASM. The paper, additionally, explores the ability of the Fama–French–Carhart factors to predict the future growth of the South African economy.

The paper relies on data of 848 firms from January 1996 to April 2012 to examine the size, BM and momentum effects on the SASM. The paper constructs the test assets from a 3 × 3 sort on size and BM and a 3 × 3 sort on size and momentum. The paper estimates momentum as the past six-months’ cumulative return. The momentum portfolios are monthly rebalanced. Additionally, the size and BM portfolios are formed annually at the end of each June.

Evidence is provided that size, BM and momentum effects exist on the SASM; also, the small- and high-BM firm portfolios, respectively, appear riskier than the big- and low-BM firm portfolios. The paper provides evidence of past winners outperforming past losers aside from the small-firm group. Additionally, the models only partially capture the size and value effects on the SASM. The Carhart model partly captures the momentum effects, but the Fama–French model is unable to describe the returns to the momentum-sorted portfolios. The evidence shows that the models’ factors predict future gross domestic product growth.

The models do not fully describe returns on the SASM; any application of the models on the SASM should be done with caution. The Carhart model better describes returns than the Fama–French model on the SASM. The Fama–French–Carhart factors may relate to the underlying economic risk of the South African economy.