The Relative Lyapunov Indicators: Theory and Application to Dynamical Astronomy

A recently introduced chaos detection method, the Relative Lyapunov Indicator (RLI) is investigated in the cases of symplectic mappings and continuous Hamiltonian systems. It is shown that the RLI is an efficient numerical tool in determining the true nature of individual orbits, and in separating ordered and chaotic regions of the phase space of dynamical systems. A comparison between the RLI and some other variational indicators are presented, as well as the recent applications of the RLI to various problems of dynamical astronomy.Comment: 39 pages, 21 figures. Non proof read version of the paper accepted in Lecture Notes in Physic

Relative indicators of default risk among UK residential mortgages

We have assembled a unique loan-level performance dataset for mortgages originated in the UK to study the differences in default likelihood between loans of varying borrower and loan characteristics. We can broadly confirm the relevance of most commonly known riskfactors and find that most drivers of default for prime are also relevant for non-conforming, drivers of repossessions are largely similar to drivers of arrears and information on adverse borrower information dominates any other risk factor. Our study provides many more details and compares results with recent studies for the US and other European countries.residential mortgages; loan defaults; consumer behaviour; logistic regression; United Kingdom

The policy relevance of absolute and relative poverty headcounts: What's in a number?

Financial poverty indicators still play an important role in policymaking and evaluation. Countries such as the USA and the EU member states use one or several ‘official’ poverty indicators on which success of poverty reduction policy is regularly monitored. Whereas the US poverty indicator is based on an absolute concept of poverty, the EU Laeken indicator is based on a relative concept. But the consequences of such a decision are considerable. As absolute and relative poverty indicators reflect related but conceptually distinct approaches to determining insufficient levels of well-being; they can yield very different poverty statistics, particularly over time. In this paper, we use the official EU and US poverty indicators to study the policy relevance of using either an absolute or a relative indicator. We find significant differences between the poverty estimates in poverty rates as well as in the poverty profiles. Benefit incidence- and adequacy rates are equally estimated and compared. The paper concludes that the differences between the two poverty concepts is more than important enough to support monitoring poverty and the related social and economic policies, using both relative and absolute poverty indicators.poverty; absolute; relative; social policy; United States; European Union

Indicators of the Relative Importance of IPRs In Developing Countries

There remains considerable controversy on the economic impact of TRIPS (interpreted here as the tightening of IPRs) in developing countries; needless to say, the new round of WTO negotiations adds considerable interest to this controversy. This paper focuses on the long-term structural issues concerning the impact of TRIPS on industrial and technology development in poor countries. It does not, therefore, deal with such important current issues as the cost of medicines, agricultural inputs or genetic materials. Even in the analysis of technology development, it has a limited objective. It seeks to indicate the potential significance of IPRs by differentiating developing countries according to the expected impact of stronger protection. It does not measure statistically the strength of IPR regimes or their impact on development as such.

Analog solar system model relates celestial bodies spatially

Portable analog planetarium indicates the relative time and space angular locations of the sun and planets. Distance measuring scales, angular direction indicators, and typical probe trajectories are included

Ratings and rankings: Voodoo or Science?

Composite indicators aggregate a set of variables using weights which are understood to reflect the variables' importance in the index. In this paper we propose to measure the importance of a given variable within existing composite indicators via Karl Pearson's `correlation ratio'; we call this measure `main effect'. Because socio-economic variables are heteroskedastic and correlated, (relative) nominal weights are hardly ever found to match (relative) main effects; we propose to summarize their discrepancy with a divergence measure. We further discuss to what extent the mapping from nominal weights to main effects can be inverted. This analysis is applied to five composite indicators, including the Human Development Index and two popular league tables of university performance. It is found that in many cases the declared importance of single indicators and their main effect are very different, and that the data correlation structure often prevents developers from obtaining the stated importance, even when modifying the nominal weights in the set of nonnegative numbers with unit sum.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure

Keeping up with the Schmidts: An Empirical Test of Relative Deprivation Theory in the Neighbourhood Context

We test empirically whether people's life satisfaction depends on their relative income position in the neighbourhood, drawing on a unique dataset, the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics. Relative deprivation theory suggests that individuals are happier the better their relative income position in the neighbourhood is. To test this theory we estimate micro-economic happiness models for the years 1994 and 1999 with controls for own income and for neighbourhood income at the zip-code level (roughly 9,000 people). There exist no negative and no statistically significant associations between neighbourhood income and life satisfaction, which refutes relative deprivation theory. If anything, we find positive associations between neighbourhood income and happiness in all cross-sectional models and this is robust to a number of robustness tests, including adding in more controls for neighbourhood quality, changing the outcome variable, and interacting neighbourhood income with indicators that proxy the extent to which individuals may be assumed to interact with their neighbours. We argue that the scale at which we measure neighbourhood characteristics may be too large still to identify the comparison effect sought after.Life satisfaction, neighbourhood effects, comparison income, reference group

Cross-sectional associations between sleep duration, sedentary time, physical activity, and adiposity indicators among Canadian preschool-aged children using compositional analyses

Abstract Background Sleep duration, sedentary behaviour, and physical activity are three co-dependent behaviours that fall on the movement/non-movement intensity continuum. Compositional data analyses provide an appropriate method for analyzing the association between co-dependent movement behaviour data and health indicators. The objectives of this study were to examine: (1) the combined associations of the composition of time spent in sleep, sedentary behaviour, light-intensity physical activity (LPA), and moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) with adiposity indicators; and (2) the association of the time spent in sleep, sedentary behaviour, LPA, or MVPA with adiposity indicators relative to the time spent in the other behaviours in a representative sample of Canadian preschool-aged children. Methods Participants were 552 children aged 3 to 4 years from cycles 2 and 3 of the Canadian Health Measures Survey. Sedentary time, LPA, and MVPA were measured with Actical accelerometers (Philips Respironics, Bend, OR USA), and sleep duration was parental reported. Adiposity indicators included waist circumference (WC) and body mass index (BMI) z-scores based on World Health Organization growth standards. Compositional data analyses were used to examine the cross-sectional associations. Results The composition of movement behaviours was significantly associated with BMI z-scores (p = 0.006) but not with WC (p = 0.718). Further, the time spent in sleep (BMI z-score: γ sleep  = −0.72; p = 0.138; WC: γ sleep  = −1.95; p = 0.285), sedentary behaviour (BMI z-score: γ SB  = 0.19; p = 0.624; WC: γ SB  = 0.87; p = 0.614), LPA (BMI z-score: γ LPA  = 0.62; p = 0.213, WC: γ LPA  = 0.23; p = 0.902), or MVPA (BMI z-score: γ MVPA  = −0.09; p = 0.733, WC: γ MVPA  = 0.08; p = 0.288) relative to the other behaviours was not significantly associated with the adiposity indicators. Conclusions This study is the first to use compositional analyses when examining associations of co-dependent sleep duration, sedentary time, and physical activity behaviours with adiposity indicators in preschool-aged children. The overall composition of movement behaviours appears important for healthy BMI z-scores in preschool-aged children. Future research is needed to determine the optimal movement behaviour composition that should be promoted in this age group

Efficient social policies with higher expenditure: an analysis for European countries

Based on the construction of two indicators to assess the relative effectiveness and efficiency of European welfare policies, we show that the variability of efficiency cannot be explained only by the amount of resources devoted to social policies but also by the institutional environment. The OLS regression shows that institutional variables- such as accountability and honesty of public officials- have high significant effects on the efficiency