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...

The principle that the simplest model capable of describing observed phenomena should also correspond to the best description has long been a guiding rule of inference. In this paper a Bayesian approach to formally implementing this principle is employed to develop model selection criteria for...

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...

The object of this paper is to produce distributional forecasts of physical volatility and its associated risk premia using a non-Gaussian, non-linear state space approach. Option and spot market information on the unobserved variance process is captured by using dual 'model-free' variance...

The object of this paper is to produce non-parametric maximum likelihood estimates of forecast distributions in a general non-Gaussian, non-linear state space setting. The transition densities that define the evolution of the dynamic state process are represented in parametric form, but the...

This paper investigates the dynamic behaviour of jumps in financial prices and volatility. The proposed model is based on a standard jump diffusion process for price and volatility augmented by a bivariate Hawkes process for the two jump components. The latter process speci.es a joint dynamic...

Dynamic jumps in the price and volatility of an asset are modelled using a joint Hawkes process in conjunction with a bivariate jump diffusion. A state space representation is used to link observed returns, plus nonparametric measures of integrated volatility and price jumps, to the specified...

A Bayesian approach to option pricing is presented, in which posterior inference about the underlying returns process is conducted implicitly via observed option prices. A range of models allowing for conditional leptokurtosis, skewness and time-varying volatility in returns are considered, with...

A Kalman filter, suitable for application to a stationary or a non-stationary time series, is proposed. It works on time series with missing values. It can be used on seasonal time series where the associated state space model may not satisfy the traditional observability condition. A new...

A perceived increase in correlation during turbulent market conditions implies a reduction in the benefits arising from portfolio diversification. Unfortunately, it is exactly then that these benefits are most needed. To determine whether diversification truly breaks down, we investigate the...