In the last few years there have been many comments made in the media about the Irish housing market boom. This paper focuses on two of these comments. The first comment is that some economists have suggested that a speculative bubble might be present in Irish house prices. The second comment is...

Agricultural land prices in many developed countries rose and then fell dramatically over a relatively short period of time in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the models in the literature that describe the dynamic behaviour of agricultural land prices suggest that these sharp price...

The signing of the Kyoto Protocol and the official recognition of forestry’s capacity to sequester carbon has prompted considerable interest, within the European Union, in forestry as a competing land use application. However, despite large increases in grants to forestry, afforestation rates,...

In this paper, the author develops a stochastic general equilibrium model of the world economy. It differs from previous multicountry models in the introduction of the government sector. The author assumes that countries produce a nonspecialized traded good and that households derive utility...

A consensus is emerging that returns to the currency carry trade are driven by two factors. One of these is probably consumption risk but there is widespread disagreement about the identity of the remaining factor. This paper bolsters the case for volatility being the unknown factor. A...

We present a simple framework in which both the exchange rates disconnect and forward bias puzzles are simultaneously resolved. The flexible-price two-country monetary model is extended to include a consumption externality with habit persistence. Habit persistence is modeled using Campbell...

This paper uses a multivariate autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to investigate the effect of British grain prices on their Irish equivalents. We find that in the long run the law of one price holds and in the short run the model captures the salient features of Irish grain...

The new payment regime for the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy adopted in June 2003 will decouple from production all direct payments made to farmers. The potential implications of this policy change for producers' land allocation decisions are analysed using a mean-variance...

The two-country monetary model is extended to include a consumption externality with habit persistence. This is set within a limited participation framework. The model is simulated using the artificial economy methodology. The 'puzzles' in the forward market are re-examined. The model is able to...