Increasing earnings inequality has been an important feature of the US and UK labour markets in recent years. The increase appears to be related to an increased demand for skilled labour and an increase in the returns to education. In this paper we examine what has happened to earnings...

This article considers the possible effects on electricity costs of implementing The Brighter Evenings Bill, 2012, which would move Ireland to Central European Time (CET). The results suggest that such a change would produce very limited savings in peak de mand for electricity and possibly some...

This paper analyses the household formation and tenure choice decisions of different age cohorts in the Irish market. We use data covering the years 2001 to 2011, a period which encompasses the boom, bubble and collapse in the Irish housing market. We find that the household formation decision...

The HERMES macroeconomic model has been used extensively for over 25 years to carry out medium-term forecasting and scenario analysis of the Irish economy. Most recently the model has been used to generate the scenarios underpinning the 2013 edition of the ESRI's Medium-Term Review. In the long...

This paper first considers the origins of the Irish economic crisis. It discusses where the policy failures occurred, to what extent they were foreseeable, and how certain key financial institutions performed in the run up to the crisis. In the light of this analysis the paper then considers...

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...

This paper considers the impact on growth and convergence in the EU over the last 20 years of investment in human capital. It examines the current adjustment of a range of economies to the external imbalances at the beginning of the current crisis. Finally it considers how the adjustments under...