Ireland provides us with a unique case-study of the effects of discrimination in the labour market. Since the ninteen-sixties and until the late nineteen-eighties, gradual reforms of explicit discrimination against females with regard to entitlement to and duration of unemployment assistance and...

This paper empirically analyses price dispersion between brand within product catgories in the Independent grocery sector. The methodology adopted allows us to discriminate between the impact which various structural demand and supply side features have on price dispersion in both traditional...

This paper analyses the sectoral distribution of US investment across EU member countries. We attempt to determine whether investment is sectorally concentrated by country and whether there seems to be any evidence of increased sectoral specialisation in US investment as the EU market has become...

This paper explores the impact of home-biased public procurement on the location of industries. It is shown theoretically and empirically that discriminatory procurement can offset other locational determinants. In the theoretical part, we demonstrate that a bias in public procurement towards...

The WTO Ministerial Conference meeting in Seattle, USA in November/December 1999 failed to launch a further round of trade negotiations. However, negotiations on further liberalisation of agricultural trade were mandated in the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and must still be...

We explore some empirical properties of gross international investment positions. In a cross-section of countries, we find that more open countries with larger domestic financial markets tend to hold greater quantities of foreign assets and liabilities.

The analysis contained in the YHEC report indicates that the report did not consider adequately the role of competition in the market for health insurance. This is a major weakness and appears in part to be due to a late deletion of competition from the report’s final research brief by the...

This paper examines whether or not being an employer was an important determinant of individual preferences for immigration restriction in the EU member states in the eve of the 2004 enlargement. Our results do not confirm that employers were more pro-immigration than the rest by expecting a...

Many theoretical models of transition are driven by the assumption that economic decision making is subject to political constraints. In this paper we empirically test whether the winners and losers of economic reform determined voting behaviour in the first five national elections in the Czech...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...