This study analyzes the effects of additional interconnection on welfare and competition in the Irish electricity market. I simulate the wholesale electricity markets of Great Britain and the island of Ireland for 2005. I find that in order for the two markets to be integrated in 2005,...

This paper compares retail and wholesale electricity prices in SEM, the market of the island of Ireland, and BETTA in Great Britain. Wholesale costs are much lower in BETTA. We show that this is mostly because the wholesale price in BETTA is set too low to cover generation costs, although it is...

In this paper we analyse the 2008 electricity price in the Irish All-Island Market. We test whether this price is 'efficient' by comparing it to the electricity price in Great Britain. This analysis suggests that around €16 per MWh of the difference in wholesale prices between Ireland and...

Social insurance programs typically comprise sick leave insurance. An important policy parameter is how the cost of sick leave are shared between workers, firms, and the social security system. We show that this sharing rule affects not only absence behavior, but also workers' subsequent health....

This paper tests whether the job security offered by stricter employment protection legislation (EPL) undermines positive compensating wage differentials that would otherwise be paid. Specifically, we ask whether industries with relatively more need for layoffs and labour flexibility have lower...

This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labor markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 9820 firms from twenty manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark-up and...