Economic transition lowered happiness on average, but did not affect all equally. This paper uses Hungarian survey data to study the impact of religion and economic transition on happiness. Religious involvement contributes positively to individuals¿ self-reported well-being. Controlling for...

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe but its application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What could be meant by exclusion of children is the first main theme of the paper. Among other things, I consider the choice of reference group, the...

The aim of this paper is to compare academic interpretations of the term social exclusion with the understanding of people with direct experience of the phenomenon. A pre-selected group of residents of deprived neighbourhoods were asked about various aspects of the concept and their responses...

In this paper the author argues that social scientists need to do more to provide policy-relevant research. Rapid technological and economic change raise new issues about how policy should adjust that are not adequately addressed by older and narrower approaches. The author suggests two ways in...

This paper derives the asymptotic distribution of nonparametric neural network estimator of the Lyapunov exponent in a noisy system proposed by Nychka et al (1992) and others. Positivity of the Lyapunov exponent is an operational definition of chaos. We introduce a statistical framework for...

This paper is an attempt to assess the extent to which the behaviour of an individual is the result of the constraints that he or she faces – factors beyond individual control - or the result of the exercise of his or her preferences. The study concentrates on participation or...

We consider a conditional empirical distribution of the form Fn(C ∣ x)=∑nt=1 ωn(Xt−x) I{Yt∈C} indexed by C∈ ℓ, where {(Xt, Yt), t=1, …, n} are observations from a strictly stationary and strong mixing stochastic process, {ωn(Xt−x)} are kernel weights, and ℓ is a class of...

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number of people living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to be unacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting of targets for particular indicators. The targets suggested...

Motivated by prediction problems for time series with heavy-tailed marginal distributions, we consider methods based on `local least absolute deviations' for estimating a regression median from dependent data. Unlike more conventional `local median' methods, which are in effect based on locally...

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term ¿informal sector¿ has been used to describe an extremely wide spectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in common, such as...