The 1955-56 macroeconomic crisis is a central event in modern Irish history. Yet, despite this centrality, its causes are not clearly understood. In 1955-6, Ireland, which had previously followed British interest rates in lockstep as part of its fixed exchange with the latter, briefly...

We apply insights from the political economy of secession to analyse the early years of the Irish Free State (IFS). The IFS was fortuitous in a debt settlement that enabled it to begin its existence debt free, whilst also receiving financial assistance to quell civil unrest. Yet the IFS was...

This paper constructs annual GDP estimates for Ireland (1924-47) to join the first complete official aggregates. The new series is deployed to revisit Ireland's economic performance in the post-independence decades. Ireland's economy grew at 1.5 per cent per annum and average living standards...

Using a new biography of banks, we examine the stability of Irish banking from 1797 to 1826 by constructing a failure rate series. We find that the ultimate cause of the frequent and severe banking crises was the crisis-prone structure of the banking system, which was designed to benefit the...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of UK banking crises over the period 1750 to 1938. We construct a new annual banking crisis series using bank failure rate data, which suggests that the incidence of banking crises was every 32 years. Using our new series and a narrative approach...

This paper constructs the first estimates of Irish regional GDP over the twentieth century and traces the relative economic performance of Ireland's regions since independence. Using an array of data sources available at a county level, output in Agriculture, Industry and Services in benchmark...

This paper studies a natural experiment in macroeconomic history: the Irish bank strike of 1966, which led to the closure of the major commercial banks for three months. We use synthetic control to estimate how the economy would have evolved had the strike not happened. We find that economic...

This paper revisits the Swedish banking crisis (1919-26) that materialized as post war deflation replaced wartime inflation (1914-18). Inspired by Fisher's 'debt deflation theory', we employ survival analysis to 'predict' which banks would fail, given certain ex-ante bank characteristics. Our...

We study Irelandś inheritance of debt following its secession from the United Kingdom at the beginning of the twentieth century. Exploiting structural differences in bonds guaranteed by the UK and Irish governments, we can identify perceived uncertainty about fiscal responsibility in the...

Geary and Stark find that Irelandś Post-Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was due to TFP growth rather than mass emigration. We devise new long-run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland in order to facilitate an assessment of sources...