The Central Bank recently published a Consultation document on macro-prudential policy for residential mortgage lending including limits on loan-to-value and loan-to-income ratios. The consultation process highlighted a number of potential implications of these measures for the housing market,...

This Economic Letter analyses original interest-only mortgages in Ireland. While interest-only arrangements have been widely used as a means of temporary forbearance to deal with the current mortgage arrears crisis, mortgages were also originated on interest-only terms during the height of the...

In this note, the continued fall in Irish house prices is examined. The increased rate of decline in 2011 resulted in Irish prices being almost 50 per cent down from peak levels of mid 2007. Accordingly, in over forty years of house price data, the fall is now one of the most significant across...

In this note, a recently published model of the Irish residential mortgage market is used to generate likely scenarios for Irish house prices out to 2013. The model allows for the interaction between house prices and mortgage credit as well as key macroeconomic variables and housing supply....

This paper applies the Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012) methodology to assess spillovers in euro area sovereign bond markets. Our analysis identifies a number of phases of interaction in those markets in recent years. We find a substantial increase in spillover between euro area sovereign bond...

This Letter describes the construction of a new monthly business cycle indicator of the Irish economy. The index of economic activity draws information from a range categories of data covering output, income, employment, external demand and credit. A statistical method is used to extract a...

Using data from the Quarterly National Household Survey, we analyse the determinants of re-employment prob- abilities among Irish workers from 2000-2012. We nd that an individual's probability of exiting unemployment diminishes with the length of stay in unemployment and age. The likelihood of...

Using data from a survey of degree graduates, this Letter presents some new empirical evidence on trends in starting salaries for new graduate labour market entrants pre and post the downturn in the Irish economy. While aggregate wage data suggest that the extent of downward wage adjustment in...

The slowdown in Irish economic activity since 2008 has been accompanied by a rise in unemployment and a sharp fall in the labour force participation rate. This note uses data from the Quarterly National Household Survey to examine the fall in participation among the younger age groups and finds...

The slowdown in the US economy in 2008, and in the housing market in particular, has been accom- panied by a sharp fall in house prices and a glut of homes for sale on the market. While the idea that this overhang of dwellings for sale should place downward pressure on house prices is intuitive,...