The European Council’s decisions to implement the De Larosiere recommendations for a reformed approach to micro-level financial supervision and a new European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) are to be welcomed. The ECB’s central role in the ESRB is also to be welcomed. However, the limited role...

In this paper, I provide a selective review of Ireland’s economic performance of the last 20 years, from the early days of the Celtic Tiger, through to the housing boom and the recent slump, and then attempt to draw a few lessons from the period. I argue, based on a range of observations, that...

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s.

The paper builds on media reportage of rice and other prices, political controversies, and food drives, to review the historiography of the Great Bengal Famine.

We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)'s sense. A practical...

We propose a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children). Following the principle of the Rothbarth approach, the identification of the children's share requires the observation of at least one adult-specific good. However, our...

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...

Systemic risk refers to the risk of financial system breakdown due to linkages between institutions. This risk cannot be assessed by looking at how individual institutions manage risks but instead requires a full understanding of how the system as a whole operates. At present, the data available...