A common approach to dealing with missing data is to estimate the model on the common subset of data, by necessity throwing away potentially useful data. We derive a new probit type estimator for models with missing covariate data where the dependent variable is binary. For the benchmark case of...

There is a large literature estimating Arrow-Pratt coefficients of absolute and relative risk aversion. A striking feature of this literature is the very wide variation in the reported estimates of the coefficients. While there are often legitimate reasons for these differences in the estimates,...

Increasing earnings inequality has been an important feature of the US and UK labour markets in recent years. The increase appears to be related to an increased demand for skilled labour and an increase in the returns to education. In this paper we examine what has happened to earnings...

The HERMES macroeconomic model has been used extensively for over 25 years to carry out medium-term forecasting and scenario analysis of the Irish economy. Most recently the model has been used to generate the scenarios underpinning the 2013 edition of the ESRI's Medium-Term Review. In the long...

This paper first considers the origins of the Irish economic crisis. It discusses where the policy failures occurred, to what extent they were foreseeable, and how certain key financial institutions performed in the run up to the crisis. In the light of this analysis the paper then considers...

This paper compares retail and wholesale electricity prices in SEM, the market of the island of Ireland, and BETTA in Great Britain. Wholesale costs are much lower in BETTA. We show that this is mostly because the wholesale price in BETTA is set too low to cover generation costs, although it is...

This paper considers the impact on growth and convergence in the EU over the last 20 years of investment in human capital. It examines the current adjustment of a range of economies to the external imbalances at the beginning of the current crisis. Finally it considers how the adjustments under...

This article considers the possible effects on electricity costs of implementing The Brighter Evenings Bill, 2012, which would move Ireland to Central European Time (CET). The results suggest that such a change would produce very limited savings in peak de mand for electricity and possibly some...