Why did the West grow so rapidly over the last 500 years, while much of therest of the world stagnated? And why several countries, especially in East Asia, grown so fast over the last half-century? If we can understand these growth experiences, and identify the forces which made them possible,...

The records of a New York savings bank founded by Irish immigrants in 1850are used to shed light o immigrant savings patterns and the early history of savings banks. The analysis of the occupations and adresses of individual account holders reveals a very broad cross-section of the New York...

Our goal here is to offer a better understanding of why workhouse mortality was as high as it was, how it varied across Ireland, and how it affected different groups in the population such as women or children.

The process of modern growth is different from the kind of growth experienced in Europe and the Orient before 1800 in that it is sustained. Whereas in the premodern past, growth spurts would always run into negative feedback, no such ceiling seems to have been limiting the economic expansion of...

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...