We review the recent performance of the Euro area economy, focusing in detail on the separate roles played by labour input, capital input, and total factor productivity (TFP). After a long period of catching up with US levels of labour productivity, Euro area productivity growth has, since the...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

Output per worker can be expressed as a function of technological efficiency and of the capital-output ratio. Because technology is exogenous in the Solow model, all of the endogenous convergence dynamics take place through the adjustment of the capital-output ratio. This paper uses the...

Despite the widespread popularity of the Solow growth model, much of the recent empirical work based on the classic framework misrepresents a crucial feature of the model. Namely, the growth rate of technological progress, assumed to be exogenous in the Solow model, is often identified as being...

Recently, some notable contributions suggest, that discretionary fiscal policy can be an effective and self- financing policy option in the presence of extreme macroeconomic conditions. Given the special relationship between the Irish sovereign and its main financial institutions, this paper...

The greater use of microeconomic and survey based data in addressing key financial stability related questions is a natural outcome of the recent financial crisis. Amongst other benefits, the use of such data enables a more precise understanding of the differing attitudes and responses of...

This paper examines the corporate funding flows of Irish credit institutions over the period 2009 to end-2010. The analysis examines the daily net movement across the consolidated corporate and retail deposit books of the domestic Irish banking sector and models these flows as a function of bank...

In an important paper, Hall and Jones (1999) show that international differences in output per worker across 127 countries in 1988 are fundamentally determined by variations in, what they term, a country's ``social infrastructure''. This paper conducts a robustness check of their findings by...

In this paper we present "now-casts" of Irish GDP using timely data from a panel data set of 41 different variables. The approach seeks to resolve two issues which commonly confront forecastors of GDP - how to parsimoniously avail of the many different series, which can potentially influence GDP...

The emergence and proliferation of the international financial crisis since mid-2007 has, amongst other issues, refocussed attention on the interrelationship between mortgage credit availability and house prices. A growing body of opinion is now of the view that the increase in credit...