It’s been a long-standing assumption that Irish manufacturing firms are price takers in their output markets. This assumption has been validated by several aggregate level studies. While a much smaller number of studies have examined this issue at a more disaggregated level, they tend to...

We propose a simple measure of beta-convergence which is not subject to Galton's fallacy. We illustrate our measure with OECD data for the period 1950-1988. We find evidence of sigma-convergence but little or no indication of beta-convergence over the period.

Are public sector workers in Ireland paid more than private sector employees, when such differences in productivity-related personal attributes and job characteristics are controlled for? We estimate that in 2001 the premium enjoyed by public servants was about 13 per cent. We find that the...

The plan of our paper is as follows. Section 2 presents a methodology which decomposes the growth rate for OECD countries for the period 1967 to 1985 into movements along and movements towards the frontier. Section 3 takes the inter-temporal change in our index of X- inefficiency developed in...

The 1992 EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) MacSharry reforms reduced intervention prices for cereals and simultaneously introduced direct payments to producers. This paper, estimating Irish cereal producers risk attitudes and associated premiums, compares the level of the direct payment with...

We apply simple measures of convergence in per capita GDP, namely, the trends in the coefficient of variation (sigma-convergence) and rank concordance (gamma-convergence), for the period 1960-1992 to a wide group of countries which are classified using the World Bank typology. The findings...

Proofs of compatibility of the expected utility and µ/s approaches to incorporating uncertainty in decision making exist for at least some utility functions and location-scale distributions. But there are severe constraints and it is desirable to investigate compatibility more widely. We do so...