This paper explores integration and contagion among US metropolitan housing markets. The analysis applies Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) house price repeat sales indexes from 384 metropolitan areas to estimate a multi-factor model of U.S. housing market integration. It then identifies...

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are the only truly liquid assets related to real estate investments. We study the behavior of U.S. REITs over the past three decades and document their return characteristics. REITs have somewhat less market risk than equity; their betas against a broad...

This paper examines government subsidisation of home ownership in Ireland since the start of the 20th Century. It argues that during the first two thirds of this period, Ireland slowly assembled government home ownership supports of such scale – in terms of the generosity of subsidies, their...

The aim of this paper is to study the ex-ante effects of the implementation of a Non Contributory Pension (NCP) program in Colombia and Peru. Relying on household survey data, we simulate the potential impact of the transfer on poverty, inequality, fiscal cost, and the probability of affiliation...

This paper examines how ownership affects professional behaviour, treatment quality and patient satisfaction in the case of hip replacements in Ireland. We use quantitative data for public hospitals and the author's own surveys for the private sector and qualitative data from 12 interviews,...

The Irish experience of fiscal retrenchment under crisis conditions poses new questions of governance, the evolving answers to which are likely to involve importance changes in the state’s organizational profile and in its policy competences. The government is required to formulate and...

Given the huge size, relatively speaking, of the human influx into Ireland over the past decade or so, the evolution of Irish attitudes to immigration is of more than parochial interest. In this paper we use the six rounds of the European Social Survey (2002-2012) in seeking to account for those...

This analysis of the PÓlya urn scheme focuses on proving two new important results. First, the correlation structure between draws of a PÓlya urn scheme is uniform. Second, fixing the number of draws and the composition of the urn, a convex stochastic ordering is induced by the number of balls...

We model intergenerational old-age support within the context of a developing country that faces demographic transition: declining fertility and increasing life expectancy. We attempt to answer if agents will be able to support their parents during the next generations and under what conditions....

With the implementation of the Basel II accord, the development of accurate loss given default models is becoming increasingly important. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new model to estimate Loss Given Default (LGD) for bank loans by applying generalized additive models. Our...