In Ireland, real property prices increased at an average of 12 per cent per annum from 1996 to 2002 with residential mortgage credit also increasing substantially. In this paper, the relationship between domestic bank credit and Irish house prices is examined empirically. Using a number of...

In an important paper, Hall and Jones (1999) show that international differences in output per worker across 127 countries in 1988 are fundamentally determined by variations in, what they term, a country's ``social infrastructure''. This paper conducts a robustness check of their findings by...

In this paper we present "now-casts" of Irish GDP using timely data from a panel data set of 41 different variables. The approach seeks to resolve two issues which commonly confront forecastors of GDP - how to parsimoniously avail of the many different series, which can potentially influence GDP...

This paper examines the changing manner in which Irish financial institutions set their variable interest rates over the period 2003 - 2011. In particular, the onset of the financial crisis clearly results in a break in the pass-through relationship between market rates and variable rates at the...

After ten years of unprecedented increases in both prices and activity levels, the Irish housing market has entered a period of significant decline. In 2007, Irish house prices, for the first time in recent history, experienced negative growth rates. Similarly, rates of house building began to...

The rapid increase in credit in an economy is now commonly perceived to be one of the leading indicators of financial instability. This view has been reinforced by the aftermath of the international financial crisis, which commenced in mid-2007. A key policy response has been to focus on the...

In this paper we present a dynamic factor model that produces nowcasts and backcasts of Irish quarterly GDP using timely data from a panel dataset of 35 indicators. We apply a recently developed methodology, whereby numerous potentially useful indicator series for Irish GDP can be availed of in...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

To date, work concerned with the potential determinants of credit institutions' profit inefficiency levels has addressed this issue in either a single-step or multi-step process. In the former, inefficiency scores are conditioned by region and bank-specific indicators, while in the latter,...