The paper places Ireland's current economic crisis in historical perspective. It compares it with four others since independence: those of 1934-38, 1939-45, the 1950s, and the 1980s. The present crisis is arguably the gravest of the five.

The human costs of famines outlast the famines themselves. An increasing body of research points to their adverse long-run consequences for those born or in utero during them. This paper offers an introduction to the burgeoning literature on fetal origins and famine through a review of research...

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...

This paper describes Ireland last major bank failure before the collapse of Anglo-Irish Bank in 2008. It points to resonances between that earlier failure and the events that led to the downfall of Ireland's banking system in 2008-2010.

Why was Britain the cradle of the Industrial Revolution? Answers vary: some focus on resource endowments, some on institutions, some on the role of empire. In this paper, we argue for the role of labour force quality or human capital. Instead of dwelling on mediocre schooling and literacy rates,...

See WP13/11

This paper first explores the history of famine in England as a window on living standards in the medieval and pre-industrial eras. It then considers nutrition levels and human capital endowments in England in the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

This paper explores the characteristics associated with marriages between Roman Catholics and members of other religious denominations (`mixed marriages') in 1911 Ireland. Using the recently-digitized returns of the 1911 census of population, we find that such marriages were relatively rare,...

This paper replies to commentaries by Sam White and by Ulf Büntgen and Lena Hellmann on our ‘The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe’. White and Büntgen/Hellmann seek to prove that Europe experienced the kind of sustained falls in temperature between the...

A century ago, and for most of the twentieth century, Ireland was a land of emigration, not immigration. However, in the space of less than a decade in the 2000s, Ireland was transformed from a homogeneous community, where nonnative residents were in a very small minority, to one in which...