Economics - Working Papers
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Item Ireland in a Danish mirror: A microlevel comparison of the productivity of Danish and Irish creameries before the First World War(European Historical Economics Society, 2021-11) McLaughlin, Eoin; Sharp, Paul; Tsoukli, Xanthi; Vedel, Christian; Danmarks Frie ForskningsfondThe relative success of the Danish and failure of the Irish dairy industries before the First World War is often contrasted given their competition for the lucrative British butter market. The traditional narrative implicitly assumes that Ireland failed because it was unsuccessful at adopting the cooperative institution, and that Irish cooperatives were not as efficient as their Danish counterparts, despite having been explicitly modelled on them. This assumption is, however, untested at the ‘firm’ level. We seek to rectify this through the analysis of a large microlevel database of creameries in both countries over the period 1898-1903. Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), a standard methodology in modern productivity studies, we find no evidence for significant productivity differences on average, although there was a much larger variance in Ireland. This nuances the idea that the Irish were unable to cooperate successfully, although some creameries were certainly productivity laggards.Item Fringe banking and financialisation: Pawnbroking in pre-famine and famine Ireland(European Historical Economics Society, 2021-09) McLaughlin, Eoin; Pecchenino, RowenaPawnbroking, one of the oldest and most accessible forms of credit, was a common feature of life in pre-famine and famine Ireland. This paper studies the role of pawnbroking in the Irish financial system during this important period, applying insights from modern studies on fringe banking to analyse pawnbroking in Ireland. In the period under study, a formal tiered financial system existed; regulated joint stock banks offered services to industry and the better off, while fringe banks provided financial services largely, but not exclusively, to unbanked groups. The main findings are that pawnbrokers provided a steady source of credit throughout the island of Ireland and that this credit stream was more durable than that provided by alternative financial service providers in the fringe banking market, especially during the famine. Our findings suggest a nuanced interpretation is needed as we find strong interrelationships between the various financial service providers.Item Automation and Irish towns: who's most at risk?(Spatial and Regional Economics Research Centre, University College Cork, 2019) Crowley, Frank; Doran, JustinFuture automation and artificial intelligence technologies are expected to have a major impact on the labour market. Despite the growing literature in the area of automation and the risk it poses to employment, there is very little analysis which considers the sub-national geographical implications of automation risk. This paper makes a number of significant contributions to the existing nascent field of regional differences in the spatial distribution of the job risk of automation. Firstly, we deploy the automation risk methodology developed by Frey and Osborne (2017) at a national level using occupational and sector data and apply a novel regionalisation disaggregation method to identify the proportion of jobs at risk of automation across the 200 towns of Ireland, which have a population of 1,500 or more using data from the 2016 census. This provides imputed values of automation risk across Irish towns. Secondly, we employ an economic geography framework to examine what types of local place characteristics are most likely to be associated with high risk towns while also considering whether the automation risk of towns has a spatial pattern across the Irish urban landscape. We find that the automation risk of towns is mainly explained by population differences, education levels, age demographics, the proportion of creative occupations in the town, town size and differences in the types of industries across towns. The impact of automation in Ireland is going to be felt far and wide, with two out of every five jobs at high risk of automation. The analysis found that many at high risk towns have at low risk nearby towns and many at low risk towns have at high risk neighbours. The analysis also found that there are also some concentrations of at lower risk towns and separately, concentrations of at higher risk towns. Our results suggest that the pattern of job risk from automation across Ireland demands policy that is not one size fits all, rather a localised, place-based, bottom up approach to policy intervention.Item Effective rates of corporation tax in Ireland(Department of Finance, 2014-04-07) Coffey, Seamus; Levey, KateItem Stocks and bonds: eggs in the same or different baskets. A cointegration analysis(Centre for Investment Research, University College Cork, 2002-08) O'Sullivan, NiallThe Johansen cointegration testing and estimation procedure is applied to examine the relationships among the stock markets, government bond markets and credit bond markets of the US, UK, Europe and Japan over the period 1985M1:2002M4. Asset class relationships are examined with returns denominated in dollars, sterling, euro and yen to determine whether long run diversification gains were achievable by international investors with these as base currencies. Cointegrating relations among currency hedged returns are also investigated. Cointegration findings, and by inference long run diversification opportunities, are found to be highly sensitive to the choice of currency in which returns are denominated and to whether currency risk is hedged, revealing the important role of exchange rates in international portfolio diversification.