Low rates of inflation have been recorded in the United States in recent years despite a decline in the unemployment rate. This phenomenon could be the results of a series of transitory shocks or of a permanent charge in the structure of the economy leading to a lower NAIRU. The paper suggests...

The standard public finance analysis of the welfare cost of labour income taxation is based on the estimation of labour supply functions that treat unemployed individuals as non-participants. This paper applies econometric models of multinomial discrete choice to the labour market, explicitly...

The authors address the question of whether the volume of manufacturing trade between Norther Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is more or less than might be expected in the light of international experience. They estimate a gravity equation for bilateral trade between 28 developed countries...

The paper collects the available Irish banking statistics from 1840 to 1921, and uses these to speculate about trends in living standards during the period. In particular, it estimates a velocity function for five countries using annual data from 1876 to 1913. It then uses this function to...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question : Are trade and factor flows substitutes? This paper uses history to fill the gap.

OLS estimates of the rate of return to education are subject to a number of potential biases. Recent developments in the literature have focused particularly on exploiting alternative instruments, arising naturally in the data, to counteract these problems. A number of such instrumens are...

This paper presents a small-open-economy model calibrated to Irish data. The model can be used for many purposes. It is applied here to the EMU debate. I comes close to replicating the employment eeffects of sterling weakness reported in the recent ESRI study.

The issue of how regional labour markets adjust to shocks has received increased attention in the context of EMu, yet relatively little is known about this aspect of the Irish economy. Using the methodology developed by Blanchard and Katz (1992) this paper explores the evolution of employment,...

Ireland's unique population history has attracted a great deal of attention. The post-Famine decline in the population -especially in the twenty six counties that now form the Republic- has been studied intensively. The historical process of change in regional and urban-rural distribution of the...

This paper examines the change in welfare in IReland over the 1987-1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculated bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...