The preholiday behaviour of equity price and return indices on the Irish Stock Exchange do nor display consistent positive pre-holiday returns. This is contrary to the majority of studies on this area, and the result is found across a number of sectoral indices. The analysis also indicates that...

An important puzzle in international finance is the failure of the forward exchange rate to be a rational forecast of the future spot rate. It has often been suggested that this puzzle may be resolved by using better statistical procedures that correct for both non-stationarity and nonnormality...

This paper examines the conditions under which investors flee from stocks to bonds or vice versa. Daily and weekly stock and bond returns are analyzed to determine when investors start to flee from a market and rebalance their portfolios. We use a theoretical model that demonstrates why rational...

The paper provides a summary measure of the Uruguay Round tariff reduction commitments in the European Union and the United States, using the Mercantilistic Trade Restrictiveness Index (MTRI) as the tariff aggregator. We compute the index for agricultural commodity aggregates assuming a specific...

This paper investigates how the formation of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the EU might affect the ability of the six Development Cooperation Ireland programme countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to continue to provide protection to their domestic agri-food sectors. Various scenarios...

The 1 August 2004 Framework Agreement stated that developing countries would have access to a Special Safeguard Mechanism and Special Products designation as part of special and differential treatment within a new WTO Doha Round agricultural agreement. This was confirmed in the Ministerial...

In this paper I investigate the effects of disasters on human capital accumulation using an extensive panel dataset on natural disasters, covering 170 countries over a 25 year period (1980-2004). My analysis shows that disasters have both a direct, contemporaneous effect and a long-term,...

We study two different safe haven assets, US government bonds and gold, and examine how the price changes of these assets can be used to infer investor behaviour under uncertainty. We find that investors are ambiguity-averse, that is they buy gold when faced with extreme uncertainty about the...

This paper analyzes the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public transfers. We assemble an innovative data set on Italian mafia and public funds to businesses at municipality level and instrument current mafia activity with rainfall in the XIX century and geographical shifters of...

This paper describes the construction of a social accounting matrix with disaggregated agricultural and food industry sectors for Ireland for the purpose of agri-food policy simulations. The base year for the AgriFood–SAM is 2005 and it draws on a recently constructed 2005 SAM for Ireland...