The successful assimilation of ethnic minorities into Western economies is one of the biggest challenges facing the Modern World. The substantial flows of Irish, to England, provide an historical example of this process. However, this has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. We use...

Very little is known about wealth-holding and its distribution in Ireland in the past. Here we employ death duty register data to analyse and identify a sample of the top wealth holders in Ireland between the early 1820s and late 1830s. We examine the sources of their wealth and its regional...

This short paper revisits two questions that were central to Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved (2nd edition, 1985). These are, first, what determined the variation in population change across Ireland during the Great Famine decade of 1841-1851 and, second, whether and in what sense can pre-famine...

This short paper revisits two questions that were central to Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved (2nd edition, 1985). These are, first, what determined the variation in population change across Ireland during the Great Famine decade of 1841-1851 and, second, whether and in what sense can pre-famine...

Using Department of Environment data on number of mortgages by size category we find that the Weibull distribution accurately models the distribution of loans under €300,000 but severely underestimates the number of larger loans. We therefore use a a Pareto distribution for loans above this...