Now showing 1 - 10 of 46
  • Publication
    Jobless growth through creative destruction : Ireland's industrial development path 1972-2003
    (UCD Geary Institute, 2007-12-05) ; ;
    We document the nature of structural changes in employment to understand “jobless” growth in Irish Manufacturing in the aftermath of EEC/EU membership, 1972-2003. By 1972, forty years of protectionism and fifteen years of export promotion induced the coexistence of large exporting plants with import competing plants within 4-digit industries. During trade liberalisation we document persistent horizontal waves of creative destruction, a decline in traditional import competing plants and an expansion in exporting plants, within each sector. This coexisted with rapid vertical waves of creative destruction in small non-exporting plants which supported exporting growth through forward vertical linkages within each sector.
      709
  • Publication
    Quality Based Rankings of Irish Economists 1990-2000
    (Economic and Social Research Institute, 2003) ;
    We use three different quality based rankings of the publishing record of Irish based economists in academic journals during the period 1990-2000 and 1995-2000. While individual rankings are sensitive to the range of journals sampled, the nature of the weights used in the ranking of the journals and the time span, a similar set of top economists are produced by the alternative rankings.
      491
  • Publication
    Structural adjustment and regional long term unemployment in Poland
    (University of Michigan. William Davidson Institute, 1997) ; ;
    On aspect of transition economics is the fact that large scale inter and intra sector adjustments in employment will have to take place in the transition period to a market economy. The required decline of agriculture and manufacturing and the rise in services induce large inter-sectoral employment adjustment. The restructuring of state and previously state owned firms will induce large intra-sectoral employment adjustment. This process has to be facilitated by a large re-allocation of workers from their initial state. Restructuring of this kind can be expected to create a lot of frictional unemployment, due to congestion in the labour market, and structural unemployment, due to individuals with redundant human capital been separated from pre-transidonal job security. In this paper we write down a structural and frictional model of unemployment resulting from structural adjustment in employment in the spirit of Aghion and Howitt (1998). The relationship between regional development and unemployment rates is not monotonic in Poland. Using Polish county level unemployment register data this papers shows that the dynamics of regional labour demand in Poland have determined unemployment in a systematic way by changing the magnitude and composition of the inflows and the regional probabilities of exit conditional on duration, gender, age, education and previous tenure. Restructuring in employment can be facilitated by the social security system by allowing workers to use unemployment as a temporary pit stop in periods of congestion created by the transition process. Restructuring can also act as a cleansing process that sheds inefficient and redundant human capital from employment with compounds in unemployment creating a long term structural component of unemployment. We show the stage of regional restructuring and development determines the levels and composition of individuals in short term and long term spells. Restructuring induces both larger throughputs and deeper structural. problems in unemployment. In the most advanced regions where congestion is lower unemployment is mainly structural in nature resulting from individuals having undertaken long spells in employment in the planned system .
      186
  • Publication
    The optimality of loss leading in multi-product retail pricing - a rationale for repealing the 1987 Groceries Order in Ireland
    (Trinity College Dublin. Department of Economics, 1996) ;
    The Competition Act in 1991 repealed all legally binding Orders in Ireland except for the 1987 Groceries Order. Article 11 of this Order categorically prohibits retail pricing in the grocery sector below the net invoice price of the wholesaler or manufacturer. The vast range of products retailed through outlets and the convenience of 'one stop' shopping result in imperfect costumer information and consumer switching costs. This enables retailers to price below cost on Known-Value-Items (KVIs) to attract customer entry and subsequently impose higher price-cost mark-ups on other non-KVIs, a practice defined as loss leading. This practice was deemed to be essentially predatory in effect by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) in 1987. In this paper we examine the potential legitimacy of below cost selling by modeling the optimal pricing of a multi-product retailer in a game-theoretic framework. We show that loss leading is an equilibrium outcome that is socially desirable in an imperfectly competitive market. We also model the repercussions of introducing the ban for equilibrium profits, corresponding services and concentration levels in the market. Our analysis suggests that a removal of the ban in favour of the 1991 Competition Act would be welfare improving.
      383
  • Publication
    A flow analysis of the link between Irish and British unemployment
    (Trinity College Dublin. Department of Economics, 1994) ;
    This paper is a contribution to the research on Irish unemployment which for the first time models the flows into and out of the Live Register. Using the quarterly flow data contructed by the authors (see A Flow Analysis of the Irish Live Register,Economic and Social Review, Volume 26, pp. 45-58, 1994), the analysis proceeds within a small open labour market framework, making use of the concepts of cointegrations and error-correction to model the flows and hence the migratory movements between Ireland and Britain. We outline the advantages of using flow data to link unemployment in a small region and a large region within an integrated labour market. We show that demographic changes resulting from natural increases in population and migration anre likely to be the key determinants of unemployment turnover in Ireland. We conclude that any explanation of Irish unemployment must account for these special features of the economy, and in particular must indicate why domestic employment movements seem to have had so little effect on the unemployment flows.
      235
  • Publication
    Embedding consumer taste for location into a structural model of equilibrium
    (University College Dublin; School of Economics, 2005-01-20) ; ;
    Given that brands (products) are location specific in terms of coverage of retail stores, we allow consumers to have preferences over location and products to carry distribution costs, alongside preferences and costs over other observable and unobservable product characteristics. We embed these considerations into Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) to jointly estimate demand and cost parameters for brands (products) in Retail Carbonated Soft Drinks. Allowing for location has a very significant impact on estimated primitives and the predictive power of the structural model. As a counterfactual exercise we show the effects on welfare of an equilibrium that results from a change in the distribution of consumer taste for location.
      247
  • Publication
    Corn market dynamics and the Joint Executive Committee (1880-1886)
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2009-06) ;
    We incorporate previously omitted controls of external conditions in transportation and commodity markets into Porter's (1983) analysis of industry demand, conduct and stability of the JEC railroad cartel. We estimate the equilibrium price path, non-parametrically, and find that the reaction of the JEC in its rate setting to the nature of rate setting, over alternative modes of conveyance, is very much predicted by the theoretical considerations in Haltiwanger and Harrington (1991). Periods of Cartel instability are triggered by unexpected booms in corn markets in New York, amongst other factors. The latter is consistent with the Green and Porter (1984) theory. Keywords: Corn Market Spot and Future Weekly Prices in Chicago and New York, Demand Cycles, Inventory Management in New York, JEC Railroad Cartel Pricing, Outside Transportation Options, Structural Modeling.
      238
  • Publication
    Gradual restructuring and structural unemployment in Poland. A legacy of central planning
    (LICOS Centre for Transition Economics, 1999) ;
    In the transition to a market economy we examine the relationship between inherited human capital structures and the evolution of unemployment within a two-sector model of endogenous restructuring. We find evidence across Polish regions for the predictions of our theory. The inherited dominance of ineffective human capital in eastern regions of Poland has delayed restructuring, reduced unemployment turnover and lowered the number of workers with out-dated human capital in the unemployment stock. On the other hand, the dominance of effective human capital in western regions has induced restructuring, boosted unemployment turnover and increased the number of workers with out-dated human capital among the unemployed. We argue that the role of government to prevent such outcomes is limited. Yet, intervention conceived as social rather than economic policies can lessen the social cost created from the inheritance of out-dated human capital, which is a legacy of central planning.
      954
  • Publication
    Did political constraints bind during transition? Evidence from Czech elections 1990-2002
    (Institute for the Study of Labor, 2005-08) ;
    Many theoretical models of transition are driven by the assumption that economic decision making is subject to political constraints. In this paper we empirically test whether the winners and losers of economic reform determined voting behaviour in the first five national elections in the Czech Republic. We propose that voters, taking stock of endowments from the planning era, could predict whether they would become "winners" or "losers" of transition. Using survey data we measure the percentage of individuals by region who were "afraid" and "not afraid" of economic reform in 1990. We define the former as potential "winners" who should vote for pro-reform parties, while latter are potential "losers" who should support leftwing parties. Using national election results and regional economic indicators, we demonstrate that there is persistence in support for pro-reform and communist parties driven by prospective voting based on initial conditions in 1990. As a result, we show that regional unemployment rates in 2002 are good predictors of regional voting patterns in 1990.
      480
  • Publication
    From the Great Lakes to the Great Rift Valley: Does Strategic Economic Policy Explain the 2009 Malawi Election?
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2014-02-28) ; ;
    Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan African states during the third wave of democratization following the end of the Cold War.While the causes and consequences of these cleavages are well studied, there have been surprisingly few attempts to understand how strategies of pan-ethnic or pan-regional coalition building based on distributive economic policies could be employed to secure national electoral coalitions. In this paper we examine if in the 2009 Malawian parliamentary elections the newly-formed national party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), led by the President Binguwa Mutharika used its incumbent position to promote an economic policy based on food security in order to overcome traditional ethno-regional voting patterns and win a nationwide electoral majority. After presenting a formal model of a optimal allocation of an economic resource to overcome ethnic bias and induce vote-switching, we use district-level data in a system of equations to analyze if strategic allocation within the national fertilizer subsidy program contributed to the nation-wide electoral victory of the DPP.
      598