A key issue in the estimation of energy hedges is the hedgers’ attitude towards risk which is encapsulated in the form of the hedgers’ utility function. However, the literature typically uses only one form of utility function such as the quadratic when estimating hedges. This paper addresses...

This paper examines cash dividends and share repurchases in Japan - discerning between keiretsu and non-keiretsu groupings of firms - during the period 1990 to 2008, a period of extensive Japanese corporate governance reform. As in the United States, share repurchases in Japan have grown...

This working paper is based on the Irish report to the OECD Expert Group on Migration, and is the key Irish input to the preparation of the annual OECD International Migration Outlook. The principal reference year is 2012, although information relating to early- 2013 is included where available...

The European Union has recently introduced the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) to provide a consistent set of rules concerning Eurozone bank resolution. In this study, we retrospectively examine the implications of the SRM for Euro- zone banks during the global nancial crisis. Empirical...

Prevailing wisdom in nance suggests long-run investors have a competitive advantage, since they can ride out short-run uctuations and mispricing, and pursue illiquid investments. This paper investigates if this advantage holds in a portfolio context, examining benets of international...

Do applicants to higher education rely on expert judgement about the quality of the course when applying? Using application data across UK universities over a period of 8 years, we investigate how league tables affect prospective students’ application decisions. We use subject specific ranking...

University tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in Ireland in 1996. This paper examines the effect of this reform on the socio-economic gradient (SES) to determine whether the reform was successful in achieving its objective of promoting educational equality. It finds that the reform...

Kanazawa (2007) offers an explanation for the variation across countries of average intelligence. It is based on the idea human intelligence is a domain specific adaptation and that both temperature and the distance from some putative point of origin are proxies for the degree of novelty that...

We present a generalized solution to Grossman’s model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an “optimal” level without adjustment costs. The Grossman model then predicts the existence of a health...

We use data from the Irish census and exploit regional and temporal variation in infant mortality rates over the 20th century to examine effects of early life conditions on later life health. Our main identification is public health interventions which eliminated the Irish urban infant mortality...