For assessing the effect of undiversified idiosyncratic risk, Basel II has established that banks should measure and control their credit concentration risk. Concentration risk in credit portfolios comes into being through an uneven distribution of bank loans to individual borrowers (single-name...

The prevalence of low birth weight is an important aspect of public health which has been linked to increased risk of infant death, increased cost of care, and a range of later life outcomes. Using data from a new Irish cohort study, I document the relationship between birth weight and...

Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan African states during the third wave of democratization following the end of the Cold War.While the causes and consequences of these cleavages are well studied, there have been surprisingly few attempts to understand how...

Children in lone parent families typically experience not only parental absence but also sibling absence: they are more likely to be sole offspring or to have fewer siblings than children of stable unions. Previous research has looked at these factors separately and suggests that they might work...

Ireland provides an interesting case study of the distributional consequences of the Great Recession. To explore such effects we develop a measure of economic vulnerability based on a multidimensional risk profile for income poverty, material deprivation and economic stress. In the context of...

This paper undertakes a structured, focused case-study comparison of housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain, based on the selection of two most-different cases that nonetheless share a common outcome of interest. Both countries were exposed to the same set of changes in their international policy...

As part of its 2020 Strategy adopted, the EU has set a number of headline targets including one for poverty and social exclusion reduction. Our analysis in this paper suggests that, in focusing on the union of the three chosen component indicators, cross-nationally we are not comparing like with...

This working paper is based on the Irish report to the OECD Continuous Reporting System on Migration (the SOPEMI Expert Group). As such, the focus of the report is largely shaped by the reporting requirements for the preparation of the annual OECD International Migration Outlook. The principal...

Steep socio-economic gradients in family size were a major source of disparities for children in the early 20th century and prompted much social research and public commentary. By the 1960s, a scholarly consensus was emerging that SES differentials in women’s fertility in western countries...

Many authors have proposed incorporating measures of well-being into evaluations of public policy. Yet few evaluations use experimental design or examine multiple aspects of well-being, thus the causal impact of public policies on well-being is largely unknown. In this paper we examine the...