On any given night in Victoria, around 4,000 children and young people live under the care and protection of the State. For many young people, this care extends over a long period of time, sometimes until their 18th birthday. It is well documented that young people leaving State care often lack...

This paper investigates the time caseworkers spend supporting long-term foster care and adoption placements. Undertaken in Australia through collaboration between university and nongovernment agency researchers, the 'Cost of Support Study' tracked the hours that caseworkers spent supporting...

We develop nonlinear leading indicator models for GDP growth, with the interest rate spread and growth in M2 as leading indicators. Since policy makers are typically interested in whether or not a recession is imminent, we evaluate these models according to their ability to predict the...

A semiparametric method is developed for estimating the dependence parameter and the joint distribution of the error term in the multivariate linear regression model. The nonparametric part of the method treats the marginal distributions of the error term as unknown, and estimates them by...

Two methods of identifying cointegrating vectors are commonly used: linear restrictions and the nonlinear method of Johansenos maximum likelihood procedure. That linear method can produce invalid estimates while the Johansen approach always produces valid estimates has been recognised in several...

We consider the properties of nonlinear exponential smoothing state space models under various assumptions about the innovations, or error, process. Our interest is restricted to those models that are used to describe non-negative observations, because many series of practical interest are so...

In this paper, a Bayesian version of the exponential smoothing method of forecasting is proposed. The approach is based on a state space model containing only a single source of error for each time interval. This model allows us to improve current practices surrounding exponential smoothing by...

We propose a new method for estimation of the hazard function from a set of censored failure time data, with a view to extending the general approach to more complicated models. The approach is based on a mixed model representation of penalized spline hazard estimators. One payoff is the...

New results for ratios of extremes from distributions with a regularly varying tail are presented. Deriving from independence results for certain functions of order statistics, 'consecutive' ratios of extremes are shown to be independent as well as non-distribution specific. They have tractable...

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of option-implied and returns-based forecasts of volatility, in which recent developments related to the impact on measured volatility of market microstructure noise are taken into account. The paper also assesses the robustness of the...