Ireland has participated in two currency unions - a bilateral union with the United Kingdom that lasted until 1979 and as a founder member of European Monetary Union that began in 1999. This paper investigates whether currency unions have influenced Irish trade patterns.

Overconfidence on the part of bankers and regulators in mechanical risk management models is an important and distinctive driver of bank failures in the current crisis. This paper illustrates the process by drawing on brief case studies of a handful of the biggest failures and losses. There are...

The 2007-8 banking crisis in the advanced economies has exposed deficiencies in risk management and prudential regulation approaches that rely too heavily on mechanical, albeit sophisticated, risk management models. These have aggravated private and economic losses, while perhaps protecting the...

This paper documents the dynamic properties of the current account, trade balance and international capital flows. For this purpose, three different approaches are taken: probit, non-parametric estimation and an asymmetric autoregression. The probabilistic approach shows that, in general,...

We quantify the role of the extensive margin in the recent trade dynamics of selected countries that are running large and persistent trade imbalances. We find that the role of the extensive margin is quite substantial, although it varies in significance across the countries in the sample....

This paper is concerned with rules of origin when intermediate goods are differentiated. An analytical model emphasizes trade patterns and the relative importance of trade in intermediates given trade preferences. Econometric evidence based on intra-OECD trade in motor vehicles and motor vehicle...

This book chapter provides for a review of quantity-based and price-based indicators of regional financial integration. These measures should be easy to construct and interpret, based on publicly available data, and available for many countries and regions over time. The chapter discusses the...

Using a daily time series from 1983 to 2005 of currency prices in spot and forward USD/Yen markets and matching equivalent maturity short term US and Japanese interest rates, we investigate the sensitivity over the sample period of the difference between actual prices in forward markets to those...

Our goal in this paper is to investigate the relation between government spending and the long-run behaviour of the Irish real exchange rate. We postulate that an increase in government consumption should be associated with real appreciation, while the impact of government investment is...