This paper estimates the marginal effect of class size on educational attainment of high school students. We control for the potential endogeneity of class size in two ways using a conventional instrumental variable approach, based on changes in cohort size, and an alternative method where...

This article combines theory and historical narratives to shed new light on the politics surrounding the making of central bank independence in contemporary Britain. Its central argument is that Gordon Brown’s decision to rewrite the British monetary constitution in May 1997 constituted an act...

This paper reports on the results of 13 semi-structured focus groups carried out with unemployed respondents across Ireland in 2010. The purpose of the research is to examine the subjective experience of unemployment across a wide range of dimensions. 15 overarching themes emerged from a...

We examine the interaction between the legal protection of investors, corporate governance within firms, institutional development between countries, and investable premia in emerging markets. In a multi country setting and using a novel dataset we find that better-governed firms experience...

Welfare states are said to have evolved over the course of the past twenty years towards a ‘social investment’ model of welfare, characterised by a focus on equality of opportunity and upward social mobility combined with greater emphasis on individual responsibility. More or less...

In light of widespread agreement that poverty and social exclusion should be understood as multidimensional phenomenon, in this paper we explore the practical implications of such an understanding in relation to widely employed indicators of such phenomena in Ireland. One persistent critique of...

This paper describes the causes and consequences of Ireland's economic crisis in the context of the policy solution implemented to contain that crisis: protracted fiscal austerity. I describe the causes of the recent crisis in Ireland, and look at the logic of austerity with a simple model. I...

The African Great Lakes Region (GLR) has witnessed some of the most intense violence and protracted conflict of the last half-century. There has been spiralling and sometimes over-lapping conflict in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (hereinafter Zone 1 conflict...

The most used regression model with binary dependent variable is the logistic regression model. When the dependent variable represents a rare event, the logistic regression model shows relevant drawbacks. In order to overcome these drawbacks we propose the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV)...

We present a model of partnership formation based on two discrete character traits. There are two classes of individual. Each individual observes a sequence of potential partners from the other class. The traits are referred to as attractiveness and character, respectively. All individuals...