This paper explores the impact of home-biased public procurement on the location of industries. It is shown theoretically and empirically that discriminatory procurement can offset other locational determinants. In the theoretical part, we demonstrate that a bias in public procurement towards...

Industry location in the European Union is examined in order to explore the relevance of the "new" theories of trade and economic geography. The analysis is based on a set of highly disaggregated intra-industry trade indices for 1961-1990, complemented by sectoral employment statistics for EU...

The presence of high and growing levels of intra-industry trade (IIT) is commonly interpreted as a reason to expect low adjustment costs following trade liberalisation. This paper argues that trade-induced adjustment pressures are not directly related to the level of static IIT but to the...

Using a gravity model, we estimate the magnitude of potential trade flows between Ireland and the five CEEC countries currently negotiating accession to the EU. We find that Irish exports were already close to their "normal" level in 1994, but that imports from the CEECs were still only half of...

This paper exposes some common misinterpretations of the "new trade theory". First, the view that high scale economies give rise to high levels of intra-industry trade is challenged. It is shown that the monopolistic-competition trade model predicts a negative relationship between internal scale...

Ireland provides us with a unique case-study of the effects of discrimination in the labour market. Since the ninteen-sixties and until the late nineteen-eighties, gradual reforms of explicit discrimination against females with regard to entitlement to and duration of unemployment assistance and...

In this paper we investigate the build-up in male long-term unemployment by allowing for heterogeneity both in the unemployment inflow and conditional survival rates. We construct semi-annual series of the male flows into and out of the Irish Live Register for the period 1967 to 1995 and develop...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of firm start-up size using data for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, and compare our results with recent findings for Portuguese manufacturing industries (Mata and Machado, 1996). To allow for firm heterogeneity between firm...

Regional goals have always played an important part in Irish industrial policy. This paper examines the employment performance of two sub-regions (designated and non-designated areas) as defined by industrial policy. By employing the job flow methodology as pioneered by Davis and Haltiwanger...

In a recent issue of Economics and Politics Crain and Leonard (1993) described the effects of compulsory voting on government spending. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, problems in Crain and Leonard's approach are identified. Their use of the median-voter model appears inconsistent...