The paper collects the available Irish banking statistics from 1840 to 1921, and uses these to speculate about trends in living standards during the period. In particular, it estimates a velocity function for five countries using annual data from 1876 to 1913. It then uses this function to...

This paper presents a small-open-economy model calibrated to Irish data. The model can be used for many purposes. It is applied here to the EMU debate. I comes close to replicating the employment eeffects of sterling weakness reported in the recent ESRI study.

This paper examines the change in welfare in IReland over the 1987-1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculated bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...

In this paper we review the Irish economy's recent economic record and explore the explanations that have been offered for its improved performance since the mid-1980s.

Why, after more than a half-century of under-performance, has the Irish economy finally found its feet? A recent authoritative study suggests five factors, without attempting to rank them: shifting demographic structure, increasing human capital, infrastructural investment, a benign...

The Great Irish Famine was truly a 'great' famine; it killed one million of 8.5 million people. Though Amartya Sen's surmise that no famine in history killed such a high proportion of the people is an exaggeration, certainly nothing remotely like the Irish famine had happened in England since...

Our goal here is to offer a better understanding of why workhouse mortality was as high as it was, how it varied across Ireland, and how it affected different groups in the population such as women or children.

The macroeconomic crisis of 1955-56 was the defining event of post-war Irish economic history. What had been an underperforming economy slid into deep recession for reasons which were poorly understood. The long-term consequences were considerable: the reorientation of economic policy that...

In Irish manufacturing, the foreign sector accounts for about one half of employment and some 60 per cent of gross output. The Irish experience therefore provides us with a textbook case study of the effects on an EU host economy of export-oriented FDI. We explore in this paper the structural...

Child benefit is a universal payment to all households with children in Ireland. Unlike other transfers however it is paid to the mother. This paper analyses expenditure patterns out of this transfer payment and compares them to expenditure patterns from other sources of income using Irish...