Ageing Populations and Housing Needs: Comparing Strategic Policy Discourses in France and England

Set against a broad European policy agenda which promotes ‘ageing in place’ and representations of older people as active, independent citizens, this article compares recent English and French policy discourses on population ageing and its implications for the housing needs of increasingly large numbers of older citizens. Through analysis of six recent strategic policy statements representing each government's official responses to population ageing and its social policy implications for the 21st century, we demonstrate how differences in the social representation of the ageing process and of older peoples themselves permeate policy discourse, influencing the perceptions of the housing needs of older citizens and the role that housing itself may play in promoting independent living. In England, demographic ageing, housing and its role in facilitating independent living and active ageing are explicitly articulated, whilst in France, the housing environment has until recently, been portrayed as one which must accommodate the illness, incapacity and dependency of later life. Our article offers explanations for these differences in terms of cultural variations in the social representations or ‘constructions’ of later life, divergences in political philosophies and welfare principles.     

R2 Bounds for Predictive Models: What Univariate Properties Tell us About Multivariate Predictability

ABSTRACT

A long-standing puzzle in macroeconomic forecasting has been that a wide variety of multivariate models have struggled to out-predict univariate models consistently. We seek an explanation for this puzzle in terms of population properties. We derive bounds for the predictive R² of the true, but unknown, multivariate model from univariate ARMA parameters alone. These bounds can be quite tight, implying little forecasting gain even if we knew the true multivariate model. We illustrate using CPI inflation data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Teaching Bayesian Statistics Using Sampling Methods and MINITAB

Bayesian statistics can be hard to teach at an elementary level due to the difficulty in deriving the posterior distribution for interesting nonconjugate problems. One attractive method of summarizing the posterior distribution is to directly simulate from the probability distribution of interest and then explore the simulated sample. We illustrate the use of Rubin's Sampling-Importance-Resampling (SIR) algorithm to simulate posterior distributions for three inference problems. In each example, we focus on the construction of the prior distribution and then use exploratory data analysis techniques to describe the posterior samples and make inferences. The use of MINITAB macros is presented to illustrate the ease of performing this simulation on standard statistical computer programs.     

A comparison of some lack of fit tests based on near replicates

Several tests for regression lack of fit proposed by Christensen (1989), Shillington (1979) and Neill and Johnson (1985) are compared. The tests considered are applicable for the case of nonreplication and reduce to the classical lack of fit test when independent replications are available. A simulation study is used to compare the size and power of the test procedures for small sample sizes and various configurations of nonreplication. In addition, each test is shown to be consistent as well as invariant with respect to location and scale changes made on the regressor variables.