Book Review

Review of: VALERIE M. FOGLEMAN, HAZARDOUS WASTE CLEANUP, LIABILITY AND LITIGATION: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SUPERFUND LAW. (Quorum Books 1992) [320 pp.] Acronyms, index, preface, selected bibliography. LC 91-47999, ISBN 0-89930-647-0. [$59.95 cloth. 88 Post Road West; Westport CT 06881.

Book Review (Anne Tramposh\u27s Avoiding the Cracks: A Guide to the Workers\u27 Compensation System)

ANNE TRAMPOSH, AVOIDING THE CRACKS; A GUIDE TO THE WORKERS\u27 COMPENSATION SYSTEM (Greenwood Press 1991) [216 pp.] Appendices, bibliography, glossary, index, preface. LC-90-21171; ISBN 0-275-93650-3

The relationship between burglary, crime rates and "fear of crime" measures: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

"Fear of crime" is an area that has attracted considerable research attention in recent decades. The primary aim of the present study was to examine the influence of crime-related predictors on perceptions and behaviours relevant to domestic burglary - a crime traditionally deemed to be of little importance. The 153 subjects were selected on the basis of victimization status. Subjects were divided into three groups - victims of domestic burglary, indirect victims of domestic burglary and nonvictims. A severity index was developed to investigate the influence of burglaries of different severities. Subjects were also selected from three areas of Palmerston North, representative of high, medium and low burglary risk areas. "Fear of crime" measures included responses to crime perceptions measures and protective actions engaged in. Crime perceptions measures included an individual's assessment of his/her perceived likelihood of future victimization and assessments of the base rate of burglary. Results did not support the presence of victimization effects. There were no significant differences on any of the variables between victims, indirect victims and nonvictims, despite estimations tending in the expected directions. The definition of a victim used in the current study (up to one year post-burglary) may have been insensitive to the presence of victimization effects. Future research should address this issue. Despite no significant findings pertaining to the severity index this is also an area identified as requiring further investigation. The burglary rate of an area had no influence on one's assessment of personal vulnerability. However, respondents were aware of the relative "safety" (in terms of burglary rates) of their neighbourhoods and generally viewed their own neighbourhood as being "safer" than Palmerston North as a whole. Despite this realistic appraisal of relative burglary rates, estimates of burglary rates were far in excess of the official incidence of burglary. Future research should address why these estimates were so inflated and what are the implications of these findings. Results about protective actions revealed that on the whole the public was ill­ informed about options available to them, and that there was considerable variability in the number of protective actions undertaken. The results of the present study indicate that a neighbourhood level approach to crime prevention and information dissemination would be most appropriate

Book Review

Review of the following: LEONARD EVANS, TRAFFIC SAFETY AND THE DRIVER. (Van Nostrand Reinhold 1991) [404 pp.] About the author, author index, figures, notes, preface, subject index, tables. LC 90-44233, ISBN 0-4421-00163-0. [Cloth $51.95. P.O.B. 668, Florence KY 41022-0668.

How Costly is it to Ignore Breaks when Forecasting the Direction of a Time Series?

Empirical evidence suggests that many macroeconomic and financial time-series are subject to occasional structural breaks. In this paper we present analytical results quantifying the effects of such breaks on the correlation between the forecast and the realisation, and on the ability to forecast the sign or direction of a time-series that is subject to breaks. Our results suggest that it can be very costly to ignore breaks. Forecasting approaches that condition on the most recent break are likely to perform better over unconditional approaches that use expanding or rolling estimation windows, provided that the break is reasonably large

Testing Dependence Among Serially Correlated Multi-category Variables

The contingency table literature on tests for dependence among discrete multi-category variables assume that draws are independent, and there are no tests that account for serial dependencies − a problem that is particularly important in economics and finance. This paper proposes a new test of independence based on the maximum canonical correlation between pairs of discrete variables. We also propose a trace canonical correlation test using dynamically augmented reduced rank regressions or an iterated weighting method in order to account for serial dependence. Such tests are useful, for example, when testing for predictability of one sequence of discrete random variables by means of another sequence of discrete random variables as in tests of market timing skills or business cycle analysis. The proposed tests allow for an arbitrary number of categories, are robust in the presence of serial dependencies and are simple to implement using multivariate regression methods