The paper collects the available Irish banking statistics from 1840 to 1921, and uses these to speculate about trends in living standards during the period. In particular, it estimates a velocity function for five countries using annual data from 1876 to 1913. It then uses this function to...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question : Are trade and factor flows substitutes? This paper uses history to fill the gap.

OLS estimates of the rate of return to education are subject to a number of potential biases. Recent developments in the literature have focused particularly on exploiting alternative instruments, arising naturally in the data, to counteract these problems. A number of such instrumens are...

This paper presents a small-open-economy model calibrated to Irish data. The model can be used for many purposes. It is applied here to the EMU debate. I comes close to replicating the employment eeffects of sterling weakness reported in the recent ESRI study.

The issue of how regional labour markets adjust to shocks has received increased attention in the context of EMu, yet relatively little is known about this aspect of the Irish economy. Using the methodology developed by Blanchard and Katz (1992) this paper explores the evolution of employment,...

Ireland's unique population history has attracted a great deal of attention. The post-Famine decline in the population -especially in the twenty six counties that now form the Republic- has been studied intensively. The historical process of change in regional and urban-rural distribution of the...

This paper examines the change in welfare in IReland over the 1987-1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculated bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...

I analyze in this paper procurement from agents protected by limited liability. I model limited liability as a verifiable bargaining tool that enables the agents to induce renegotiation when the contracted price does not cover the project's cost. I show that the determination of the optimal...

In this paper we review the Irish economy's recent economic record and explore the explanations that have been offered for its improved performance since the mid-1980s.

This paper analyses inequality in Ireland via a decomposition of the Gini coefficient by source of income. Using data from the Irish Household Budget Survey of 1987, seventeen components of disposable income are identified and their contribution to inequality evaluated. Their contribution to...