in this paper I examine the effects of the abolition of collge tutuion on education levels by social class.the empirical analysis shows that this policy has had little effect on the distribution of edcation across classes. I present a number of possible exp0lanations for this finding.

We examine if the benefits of international portfolio diversification are robust to time-varying asset return volatility. Since diversified portfolios are subject to common cross-country shocks, we focus on the transmission mechanism of such shocks in the presence of regime-switching volatility....

Women married to unemployed men in Britain have lower participation rates than those married to employed men. Possible reasons include unfavourable local labour market conditions affecting both, their both having poor labour market characteristics, and the means testing of benefits, which...

The inclusion of neighbourhood quality variables has been recognised as reducing the bias in house price indices and increasing the explanatory power of regression based hedonic indices. The ability to identify the type of purchaser is used in this paper to test the importance of neighbourhood...

This paper re-examines the Telser services externality for the case where services required of retailers by manufacturers involve provision of image. It is argued that refusal to supply retailers who attempt to free-ride may be the only vertical restraint which can ensure provision of the...

This paper investigates the degree of risk aversion exhibited by Irish fund managers. Assuming a mean-variance optimising manager, we employ the dynamic conditional correlation specification (Engle, 2002) of the multivariate GARCH model to estimate the coefficient of relative risk aversion. We...

In this paper we ask why was there a consumption boom in Ireland in the late 1980s? We put forward an expalnation, namely, that worsening borrowing conditions led agents to conume more out of disposable income. We explicityly model the economy as consisting of two types of consumers. One type...

This paper considers the derivation of new demand systems from existing ones through replacing an indirect utility function ) , ( y U p by } ) / ( , { j y p y y U j j â ã Ó . p , where p is a vector of prices and y is income. This is a generalisation of Gorman translation ) , ( j j p y U ã...

Are public sector workers in Ireland paid more than private sector employees, when such differences in productivity-related personal attributes and job characteristics are controlled for? We estimate that in 2001 the premium enjoyed by public servants was about 13 per cent. We find that the...