The Message in Daily Exchange Rates: A Conditional-Variance Tale

Formal testing procedures confirm the presence of a unit root in the autoregressive polynomial of the univariate time series representation of daily exchange-rate data. The first differences of the logarithms of daily spot rates are approximately uncorrelated through time, and a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model with daily dummy variables and conditionally t-distributed errors is found to provide a good representation to the leptokurtosis and time-dependent conditional heteroscedasticity. The parameter estimates and characteristics of the models are found to be very similar for six different currencies. These apparent stylized facts carry over to weekly, fortnightly, and monthly data in which the degree of leptokurtosis and time-dependent heteroscedasticity is reduced as the length of the sampling interval increases.     

Modelling and simulation for one‐day cricket

This article is concerned with the simulation of one‐day cricket matches. Given that only a finite number of outcomes can occur on each ball that is bowled, a discrete generator on a finite set is developed where the outcome probabilities are estimated from historical data involving one‐day international cricket matches. The probabilities depend on the batsman, the bowler, the number of wickets lost, the number of balls bowled and the innings. The proposed simulator appears to do a reasonable job at producing realistic results. The simulator allows investigators to address complex questions involving one‐day cricket matches. The Canadian Journal of Statistics © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

The Contours and Correlates of Informal Work in Rural Pennsylvania*

Abstract Social scientists have increasingly come to recognize the informal economy as a prominent and permanent structural feature of modern society. Rural sociologists have made a considerable contribution to this literature, demonstrating informal work to factor prominently in the livelihood strategies of rural Americans. Despite this scholarly attention significant gaps persist in our understanding of the informal economy. Drawing on data from a survey of family households in nonmetropolitan Pennsylvania, this paper examines the contours and correlates of informal work. The results make a strong case that participation in informal work is widespread and most often combined with formal work as a household livelihood strategy. While income is not found to be a significant correlate of informal work, it is found to influence the reasons cited for participation. Important correlates of informal work are identified and differences in the factors associated with informal work done to generate income (cash or in‐kind) versus savings are revealed.     

Facing Up to Underfunding: Equity and Retrenchment in Community Care

Local social services departments in the UK are expected to distribute their cash-limited budgets for community care in ways that achieve an equitable allocation of resources in situations where, with present levels of funding, they cannot meet all the needs with which they are presented. This paper discusses a case study of the introduction of a "needs-based" formula to allocate a local authority's budget for home care services and a follow-up survey to investigate whether services reached the people intended to benefit. The article argues that the "gatekeeping" role of community care assessments is important to safeguard equity without the inflexibility of highly standardized tests of eligibility. However, with the new Labour government seeking to reduce dependency on public expenditure, and a growing lobby for national standards of social care, it will be increasingly important that local authorities justifiy their different practices with evidence about how they relate to local needs.     

A Relational Gompertz Model of Male Fertility: Development and Assessment

Brass has proposed a relational Gompertz model of female fertility which, in combination with the standard fertility distribution developed by Booth, has proved useful in a range of applications, such as indirect estimation, demographic modelling, and population projections. This paper develops a standard distribution of male fertility for use in conjunction with the relational Gompertz model. The derivation of the standard takes advantage of the similarity between the shape of male and female fertility distributions. It entails ‘stretching’ the female standard, so that it extends to age 80, and then transforming it, using the Gompertz model into a pattern which is more typical of male fertility distributions in the developing world. An assessment of this new standard by fitting the relational Gompertz model based on it to a series of male fertility distributions from diverse populations, suggests that it performs very well.     

Walking in rhythms: place,regulation, style and the flow of experience

Following Henri Lefebvre, this article investigates the distinct rhythms of walking and the ways that it intersects with diverse temporalities and spaces. Because walking is practised and experienced in innumerable contexts, generalisations are problematic. Nevertheless, this article identifies some of the ways in which walking produces time-space and the experience of place. I subsequently discuss how walking is inevitably conditioned by multiple forms of regulation but possesses peculiar characteristics that always make these orderings of space and body contingent, facilitating immanent, often unexpected experiences. I further examine how walking is surrounded by notions of style that reproduce particular rhythms. Walking is inevitably, therefore, suffused with contending notions about how and where to walk, by ideals and conventions laid down by the powerful and not-so-powerful. However, I pay attention to the multiple phases and moments of walking. Both the conventions of walking and its unfolding, sensual and contingent apprehension are difficult to elucidate in academic prose, and luckily there are several challenging walking artists whose work highlights these issues and the rhythmic dimensions of walking. Accordingly, I draw upon the ‘textworks’ of Richard Long, Francis Alys's series of walks entitled Railings, and Jeremy Deller's 2009 Procession to elicit some of the rhythms of walking.     

Generalized stochastic dominance and bad outcome aversion

Incomplete preferences over lotteries on a finite set of alternatives satisfying, besides independence and continuity, a property called bad outcome aversion are considered. These preferences are characterized in terms of their specific multi-expected utility representations (cf. Dubra et al., J Econ Theory, 115:118–133, 2004), and can be seen as generalized stochastic dominance preferences.