Discrimination and Inequality in Housing in Ireland. ESRI Research Series, June 2018

Access to housing is a fundamental human right protected under international conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Social Charter. Adequate housing is also necessary for the achievement of other basic rights such as health and family life and is central to quality of life of adults and children. In Ireland, discrimination in the provision of housing is prohibited under the Equal Status Acts (2000- 2015). Starting from these legislative protections, in this study we consider whether certain groups in Ireland experience higher levels of discrimination in access to housing and whether they experience unequal housing outcomes. Membership of these groups is linked to other relevant characteristics, most importantly socio-economic background. Therefore, this study investigates whether equality groups experience disadvantages in housing outcomes that cannot be fully explained by their socio-economic resources. The study of housing discrimination and outcomes has become even more pressing in recent years because of the marked undersupply of housing in Ireland and problems of affordability

The Evolution of a Spatial Stochastic Network

The asymptotic behavior of a stochastic network represented by a birth and death processes of particles on a compact state space is analyzed. Births: Particles are created at rate $\lambda_+$ and their location is independent of the current configuration. Deaths are due to negative particles arriving at rate $\lambda_-$. The death of a particle occurs when a negative particle arrives in its neighborhood and kills it. Several killing schemes are considered. The arriving locations of positive and negative particles are assumed to have the same distribution. By using a combination of monotonicity properties and invariance relations it is shown that the configurations of particles converge in distribution for several models. The problems of uniqueness of invariant measures and of the existence of accumulation points for the limiting configurations are also investigated. It is shown for several natural models that if $\lambda_+<\lambda_-$ then the asymptotic configuration has a finite number of points with probability 1. Examples with $\lambda_+<\lambda_-$ and an infinite number of particles in the limit are also presented

Optimal stopping for partially observed piecewise-deterministic Markov processes

This paper deals with the optimal stopping problem under partial observation for piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. We first obtain a recursive formulation of the optimal filter process and derive the dynamic programming equation of the partially observed optimal stopping problem. Then, we propose a numerical method, based on the quantization of the discrete-time filter process and the inter-jump times, to approximate the value function and to compute an actual $\epsilon$-optimal stopping time. We prove the convergence of the algorithms and bound the rates of convergence