The performance of the Irish economy in recent years has been outstanding. Between 1994 and 2000, Ireland’s economic growth, as measured by the annual percentage change in real GDP (Gross Domestic Product), has expanded at an annual average rate of approximately 9 per cent. Over the same time...

This paper presents the results of research into the construction of a composite leading indicator of the Irish rate of inflation, as measured by the annual percentage change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). It follows the work of Fagan and Fell (1994) who applied the business cycle leading...

Models of inflation usually have monetary policy impacting the economy through either an interest rate or a monetary/credit quantity channel but not through both. We argue that policy is transmitted via two distinct types of agents – those that are and that are not liquidity constrained. The...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the methodology known as Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) analysis and to examine its applicability in the context of Irish macroeconomics. The SVAR approach has been developed over the last decade to interpret business cycle...

The existence of durable goods implies that the welfare flow from consumption cannot be directly associated with total consumption expenditures. As a result, tests of standard theories of consumption (such as the Permanent Income Hypothesis, or PIH) typically focus on nondurable goods and...

Using a number of long-term maturities and monthly data, 1989-1997, we provide a number of tests of the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure. The main insight in this paper is the use of the excess holding period return to provide a proxy for a possible time varying term premium....

This paper formulates a simple monetary model to analyse the role of money in the determination of inflation in Ireland. The model suggests that monetary disequilibrium can affect inflation directly via the exchange rate and indirectly by increasing the rate of inflation in the non-traded...

In this paper we present "now-casts" of Irish GDP using timely data from a panel data set of 41 different variables. The approach seeks to resolve two issues which commonly confront forecastors of GDP - how to parsimoniously avail of the many different series, which can potentially influence GDP...

This paper presents an extension of the analysis of the geographic dimension of trade, by examining the trading patterns of individual firms. Aggregate data does not tell us if a sector is geographically diversified because there are many exporting firms, each of which specialises in a separate...

This paper describes a RATS (www.estima.com) routine to implement the Chow Lin (1971) procedure for the best linear unbiased distribution and interpolation of time series by related series. Various versions of this procedure have been used in the Bank to distribute/interpolate annual to...