On the basis of currency available information it seems reasonable to assume that European Monetary Union (EMU) will become a reality in the early years of the next century and that at least two of the EU's larger economies, Germany and France, will be participants. Unfortunately the same...

This paper reviews previous research on Irish unemployment. It examines the reasons for the persistence of high unemployment and the relevence of the concept of a time-varying rate of "equilibrium" unemployment in a small labour market. The links between Irish and British unemployment, and the...

This paper presents and discusses new estimates of the manufacturing and public capital components of the Irish gross capital stock for the ten-year period 1985-1994. The new data are used to estimate aggregate production functions for Irish manufacturing in the period 1951-1994, in order to...

In this paper I will provide a quick overview of the available quantitative source on mortality and what has been done with them. I will then turn biefly to what one quantative, impressionistic source has to say about mortality. I wil then offer an econometric analysis of the famines's toll. The...

Most theories of involuntary unemployment predict that the equilibrium wage in the labor market will be greater than the reservation wage of the unemployed. Those theories concentrate on explaining why the labor market does not clear, with the market wage falling to the level of the reservation...

In this paper a rich and innovative dataset, the International Adult Literacy Survey, is used to examine the impact of cognitive skill/functional literacy earnings. The IALS surveys 12 OECD countries and sub-regions via a consistent questionnaire and includes a number of tests of numeracy and...

A simple look at nominal or effective tariff rates is not sufficient to analyse the trade policy. One has to consider the overall effects of protection, and by definition this requires a general equilibrium approach. The present paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. It makes use of a...

About half of all vacancies are filled through networks of personal contacts. We consider the implications of such labour networks for inequality. Our central result is that referral networks display threshold behaviour.

In this paper we provide an analytical review of previous estimates of the rate of return on schooling investments and measure how these estimates vary by country, over time, and by estimation method. We find evidence of reporting (or "file drawer") bias in the estimates and, after due account...