The Irish experience of fiscal retrenchment under crisis conditions poses new questions of governance, the evolving answers to which are likely to involve importance changes in the state’s organizational profile and in its policy competences. The government is required to formulate and...

Given the huge size, relatively speaking, of the human influx into Ireland over the past decade or so, the evolution of Irish attitudes to immigration is of more than parochial interest. In this paper we use the six rounds of the European Social Survey (2002-2012) in seeking to account for those...

This analysis of the PÓlya urn scheme focuses on proving two new important results. First, the correlation structure between draws of a PÓlya urn scheme is uniform. Second, fixing the number of draws and the composition of the urn, a convex stochastic ordering is induced by the number of balls...

We model intergenerational old-age support within the context of a developing country that faces demographic transition: declining fertility and increasing life expectancy. We attempt to answer if agents will be able to support their parents during the next generations and under what conditions....

With the implementation of the Basel II accord, the development of accurate loss given default models is becoming increasingly important. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new model to estimate Loss Given Default (LGD) for bank loans by applying generalized additive models. Our...

For assessing the effect of undiversified idiosyncratic risk, Basel II has established that banks should measure and control their credit concentration risk. Concentration risk in credit portfolios comes into being through an uneven distribution of bank loans to individual borrowers (single-name...

The prevalence of low birth weight is an important aspect of public health which has been linked to increased risk of infant death, increased cost of care, and a range of later life outcomes. Using data from a new Irish cohort study, I document the relationship between birth weight and...

Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan African states during the third wave of democratization following the end of the Cold War.While the causes and consequences of these cleavages are well studied, there have been surprisingly few attempts to understand how...

Geographic diversification is fundamental to risk mitigation among investors and insurers of housing, mortgages, and mortgage-related derivatives. To characterize diversification potential, we provide estimates of integration, spatial correlation, and contagion among US metropolitan housing...

Children in lone parent families typically experience not only parental absence but also sibling absence: they are more likely to be sole offspring or to have fewer siblings than children of stable unions. Previous research has looked at these factors separately and suggests that they might work...