Current methods for constructing house price indices are based on comparisons of sale prices of residential properties sold two or more times and on regression of the sale prices on the attributes of the properties and of their locations. The two methods have well recognised deficiencies,...

Structural equation models (SEM) are commonly used to analyze the relationship between variables some of which may be latent, such as individual ``attitude'' to and ``behavior'' concerning specific issues. A number of difficulties arise when we want to compare a large number of groups, each with...

We propose an alternative method for measuring intergenerational mobility. Measurements obtained from traditional methods (based on panel data) are scarce, difficult to compare across countries and almost impossible to get across time. In particular, this means that we do not know how...

Using data from the Spanish household budget survey, we investigate life- cycle effects on several product expenditures. A latent-variable model approach is adopted to evaluate the impact of income on expenditures, controlling for the number of members in the family. Two latent factors...

The present paper proposes a model for the persistence of abnormal returns both at firm and industry levels, when longitudinal data for the profits of firms classiffied as industries are available. The model produces a two- way variance decomposition of abnormal returns: (a) at firm versus...

A class of composite estimators of small area quantities that exploit spatial (distancerelated) similarity is derived. It is based on a distribution-free model for the areas, but the estimators are aimed to have optimal design-based properties. Composition is applied also to estimate some of the...

We present a new general concentration-of-measure inequality and illustrate its power by applications in random combinatorics. The results find direct applications in some problems of learning theory.

Let a class $\F$ of densities be given. We draw an i.i.d.\ sample from a density $f$ which may or may not be in $\F$. After every $n$, one must make a guess whether $f \in \F$ or not. A class is almost surely testable if there exists such a testing sequence such that for any $f$, we make...

We investigate on-line prediction of individual sequences. Given a class of predictors, the goal is to predict as well as the best predictor in the class, where the loss is measured by the self information (logarithmic) loss function. The excess loss (regret) is closely related to the redundancy...

Informal care is today the form of support most commonly used by those who need other people in order to carry out certain activities that are considered basic (eating, dressing, taking a shower, etc.), in Spain and in most other countries in the region. The possible labour opportunity costs...