Sexuality and human rights in europe

Written human rights law in Europe is as scanty as in the rest of the world. Case-law however provides considerable protection of sexual rights. It guarantees comprehensive protection of autonomy in sexual life, also for minors, and provides protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Negative attitudes of a majority may not justify interferences with the sexual rights of a minority and society could be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience to enable individuals to live in dignity and worth in accordance with the sexual identity chosen by them. Compensation for interference with sexual autonomy and freedom is awarded. This high-level protection (as compared to other parts of the world) is however limited. It seems to be granted only in areas where it corresponds with public attitudes and social developments. And it is seldom secured on the national level but nearly exclusively by the European Court of Human Rights, whose case-law is often weakened by inconsistency.     

Making wald tests work for cointegrated VAR systems

Wald tests of restrictions on the coefficients of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes are known to have nonstandard asymptotic properties for 1(1) and cointegrated systems of variables. A simple device is proposed which guarantees that Wald tests have asymptotic X2-distributions under general conditions. If the true generation process is a VAR(p) it is proposed to fit a VAR(p+l) to the data and perform a Wald test on the coefficients of the first p lags only. The power properties of the modified tests are studied both analytically and numerically by means of simple illustrative examples.     

CHILDREN OF A (POLICY) REVOLUTION: THE INTRODUCTION OF UNIVERSAL CHILD CARE AND ITS EFFECT ON FERTILITY

What role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility? We exploit a major German reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility. The fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin, and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration. Our findings inform policy makers concerned about low fertility by suggesting that universal early child care holds the promise of being an effective means of increasing birth rates.     

Mental Models in Risk Assessment: Informing People About Drugs

One way to communicate about the risks of drugs is through the use of package inserts. The problems associated with this medium of informing patients have been investigated by several researchers who found that people require information about drugs they are using, including extensive risk information, and that they are willing to take this information into account in their usage of drugs. But empirical results also show that people easily misinterpret the information given. A conceptual framework is proposed that might be used for better understanding the cognitive processes involved in such a type of risk assessment and communication. It is based on the idea that people develop, through experience, a mental model of how a drug works, which effects it might produce, that contraindications have to be considered, etc. This mental model is "run" when a specific package insert has been read and a specific question arises such as, for example, whether certain symptoms can be explained as normal or whether they require special attention and action. We argue that the mental model approach offers a useful perspective for examining how people understand package inserts, and consequently for improving their content and design. The approach promises to be equally useful for other aspects of risk analysis that are dependent upon human judgment and decision making, e.g., threat diagnosis and human reliability analysis.     

Modelling interaction patterns in a predator-prey system of two freshwater organisms in discrete time: an identified structural VAR approach

Statistical Methods & Applications - In ecology, the concept of predation describes interdependent patterns of having one species (called the predator) killing and consuming another (the prey)....     

Contracting with Imperfect Commitment and the Revelation Principle: The Single Agent Case

This paper extends the revelation principle to environments in which the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to the outcome induced by the mechanism. We show that he may optimally use a direct mechanism under which truthful revelation is an optimal strategy for the agent. In contrast with the conventional revelation principle, however, the agent may not use this strategy with probability one. Our results apply to contracting problems between a principal and a single agent. By reducing such problems to well‐defined programming problems they provide a basic tool for studying imperfect commitment.     

Prediction of sports injuries in football: a recurrent time-to-event approach using regularized Cox models

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - Data-based methods and statistical models are given special attention to the study of sports injuries to gain in-depth understanding of its risk factors and...