Most central banks use a short-term interest rate such as the one-month money market interest rate as their main instrument of monetary policy. Changes to this short-term interest rate are the first important step in the transmission of monetary policy. Consumption and investment decisions made...

In Ireland, real property prices have increased at an average of 12 per cent per annum between 1996 and 2002 with residential mortgage credit also increasing substantially. The Irish economy provides an interesting case study of a rapidly growing economy with very low nominal interest rates...

This letter considers Ireland’s external debt by sector and compares Ireland to other euro area member states. External debt measures are important for assessing financial stability risks, but Irish headline external debt includes the internationally-traded financial services sector, which...

This paper proposes that a variant of the Battese and Coelli (1995) inefficiency model can be applied as a consistent and unifying framework in exploring the determinants of credit institutions’ profit inefficiency scores. To date, work concerned with the potential determinants of credit...

This paper presents aggregated cost efficiency scores for a balanced panel of British and Irish credit institutions and relates these scores to loan loss reserves as a first step in investigating their usefulness as possible indicators of financial fragility. The efficiency scores are oobtained...