This article examines the mathematical abilities of 15-year-olds in a range of countries which participated in the 2003 cycle of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED)'s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Utilizing information on the scores obtained by individual students in the mathematical part of the PISA assessment, we use a range of indicators from the literature on inequality and poverty to evaluate the 'mathematical performance' of participating countries. Since data from PISA contained a wealth of information on the circumstances of the students in terms of their home and school environment, we identify and examine the relative influence of factors which serve to enhance the mathematical performance of students in the PISA assessment.

The authors use the techniques of decomposition analysis to explain differences in survival rates between different groups of 1st year undergraduate students at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and explain how much of the overall inequality in survival rates can be explained by inequality within groups and how much can be explained by inequality between groups. They find that 45.1% of the observed difference of 8.2 points in survival rates between female and male students can be explained by gender whereas only 1.4% of the observed difference of 7.4 points in survival rates between Protestant and Catholic students only 1.4% can be explained by religion. Therefore, attribute differences are important in explaining differences in survival rates between males and females, but not between Protestants and Catholics. When looking at how much of the overall inequality in survival rates could be explained by inequality within groups and how much by inequality between groups; they find that the best explanation for the observed inequality in the distribution of survival probabilities was given by the type of course studied accounting for nearly 2/3 of the inequality between students.

This article applies duration analysis to pricing behaviour in an oligopolistic industry, namely the UK Retail Petrol Industry, for the period January 1983 to October 1989. The findings of the analysis are that: a period of rising or falling prices will reduce the lengths of price stability and that periods of price stability ending in March or April lasted longer than those ending in other months as firms awaited changes in the excise rate in the Budget. There was no evidence that the leading firm, Esso, exhibited longer periods of price stability, a result consistent with the hypothesis of conscious parallelism in pricing behaviour in an industry.