News

 

Sep 06, 2011

Trinity Economics Lecturers Edit 'Economy of Ireland'

The Minister for Finance, Mr Michael Noonan TD launched the eleventh edition of the 'Economy of Ireland' book last week in Government Buildings. Edited by two Trinity economics lecturers in the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Dr Carol Newman and Professor John O'Hagan, the book surveys all major changes in the Irish economy in the past fifteen years, with particular emphasis on the last five years.

Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan TD with co-editors of the 11th edition of the Economy of Ireland, Dr Carol Newman, centre, and Prof John O'Hagan, second from the right, Lecturers in Economics and some of the other contributors, from left, Tara McIndoe-Calder, Central Bank, Marion O'Brien, Gill & Macmillan, and Dr Eleanor Denny, Michael King, Micheal Collins and Prof Philip Lane, all of Trinity’s Department of Economics.

Commenting on the significance of the book, Professor John O'Hagan said: “The book was first published in 1975 and has been very popular ever since across the third-level sector and with a general lay audience interested in a long-term overview of the economy and the principles that govern its operation. All of the contributors are colleagues lecturing in economics in Trinity or else are Trinity economics graduates.  This is a clear indication of how our academics are contributing to the current research, debate and thinking in this important area”.

To mark the publication of the book the Irish Times last week ran a major Opinion and Analysis  series on 'Stress-Testing the Irish Economy', using articles written by five of the contributors.  The series concluded with the lead Editorial on 3rd September last devoted to the series.

 

June 24, 2011

The announcement of the 2011-2012 Fulbright Scholarships saw two PhD students from the Department of Eocnomics receive awards.  Fulbright scholarships provide Irish and US students, scholars and professionals with the opportunity to study, lecture and research at top universities and institutions in the US and Ireland respectively.  The awards are jointly funded by the Irish and US governments under the Ireland-United States Commission for Educational Exchange.

Eoin McGuirk will undertake research in development economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Catarina Marvoa is the recipient of a Fulbright – Schuman Award that promotes research and teaching in EU – US studies.  She will be based in the Department of Economics of Johns Hopkins University for 6 months where she will undertake research in the area of Regulation of Cartels in the EU and US.

August 27, 2010

Economics/IIIS PhD Student selected for a FEEM Award at the Annual Congress of the European Economic Association (EEA)

Congratulations to Benjamin Elsner (PhD Student) who has been selected for a FEEM award at the Annual Congress of the European Economic Association for his paper
 "Does Emigration Benefit The Stayers? The Eu Enlargement As A Natural Experiment. Evidence From Lithuania".
There are just three FEEM prizes at the EEA congress - there were 700 applicants, so it is a huge honour for Ben. The FEEM award is open to economists under 30 and no more than 3 years from completing the PHD  - so Ben was competing with economists much further along in their careers.

Ben received the award from Joseph Stiglitz and Bernardo Bortolotti (Executive Director of FEEM) at the congress.

More details about FEEM award at: http://www.eea2010glasgow.org/feem-award.asp

 

May 07, 2010

A group of Junior Freshman students visited Google headquarters recently as part of their statistics module. The students had been working throughout Hilary Term in groups on statistics-related case studies that were developed by Dr Jacco Thijssen of the department in cooperation with Mr Eoghan Nolan of Google. The best performing group was invited, together with their lecturer and TA, for a tour of Google headquarters, providing some light relief in the exam period. The case studies are a good example of how the department encourages the development of transferrable skills in students and shows its commitment to fostering close links with the business community.

 

April 27, 2010

Congratulations to Fiona Wainwright, a postgraduate in the Department of Economics, whose paper was chosen as the best paper by a young economist at the IEA conference in Belfast last weekend.

 

Feb 24, 2010

Professor Philip Lane Receives International Award for Research on the Wealth of 145 Countries

Professor of International Macroeconomics, Philip Lane has been selected for the 2010 Bhagwati Award, jointly with his collaborator Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti of the International Monetary Fund. A prize is given every two years for the best article published in the Journal of International Economics during the previous two years. The award is in honour of the renowned trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati for his many contributions to the field of international economics.

Selected by the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Economics, the sixth paper to win the Bhagwati Award is The External Wealth of Nations: Mark II: Revised and Extended Estimates of Foreign Assets and Liabilities, 1970-2004 by Philip R.Lane and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, which appeared in the JIE in November 2007. 

 The External Wealth of Nations project calculates the foreign asset and foreign liability positions for 145+ countries since 1970 and is widely used in academia, policy organisations and the financial sector in the analysis of topics such as global imbalances, debt sustainability and financial globalisation.  The original version of this database was developed in the late 1990s. The Mark II version expanded the country coverage from 67 to 145 countries and extended the time period covered by the dataset. The dataset was described by The Economist magazine (September 22nd, 2005) as “the world's best dataset on foreign assets and liabilities” and it is widely used around the world in research on financial globalisation by academics, policy organisations and the private sector.  

 Commenting on the award, Professor Lane said: “The Journal of International Economics is the leading field journal in international economics, with many of the world's leading international economists on its Editorial Board so it is quite an honour to be selected for this award. It is valuable recognition for a large-scale project that has expanded over the last decade. Research students at the IIIS have assisted in the development of the dataset and several doctoral dissertations have been devoted to the analysis of these data. This award further establishes the reputation of the IIIS as a leading centre for research in international economics.”

 

Jan 11, 2010

Professor Kevin O'Rourke Receives European Research Council Grant to Study Trade Policy and Great Depression

A €1.4 million grant has been awarded to Professor Kevin O'Rourke enabling him to research the inter-relationships between trade, trade policy and the Great Depression. Professor O'Rourke is the first Irish-based researcher to receive a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator Grant.

Commenting on his research project, Professor O'Rourke stated: “The economic literature on the Great Depression has focussed on the macroeconomic policies which led to it, with trade being relegated to a minor role in most previous studies. We therefore know remarkably little about the extent to which international commodity markets disintegrated during the period. Furthermore, very little is known about the causes of the slump in trade, and the role of protectionism, and about the consequences of interwar protection for employment and growth in the short and long run”.

ERC Advanced Investigator Grants allow exceptional established research leaders in any field of science, engineering and scholarship to pursue frontier research of their choice. They aim to encourage risk-taking and interdisciplinarity, and support pioneering research projects.

Professor O’Rourke’s five year research project will explore the short run inter-relationships between output and employment, trade, and trade policy during the Great Depression. It will also place the event in the longer run context of the gradual spread of industry from the European and North American core to the European periphery and the rest of the world.

The project will compile a large-scale online database available to other scholars including primary data from national and international statistical sources, for example the League of Nations. In addition it will include data produced subsequently by economic historians: on inter alia trade, trade policy, industrial output, and commodity and factor prices, for 1870-1960.

The trade, output and policy data will be sectorally disaggregated, allowing a thorough assessment of the role of policy. The data will be analysed using standard economic techniques, but since the political and geopolitical consequences of such events are crucial in the long run, a more qualitative historical analysis will also be provided.

 

Oct 21, 2009

Staff Research Activities

Sean Barrett

The launch of Dr Sean Barrett's book Deregulation and the Airline Business in Europe this summer by Routledge of Oxford and New York acknowledges his role as one of the leading analysts and advocates of airline deregulation. In the foreword, Professor Alfred Kahn, the leading US authority on airline deregulation writes that "the gains from policy entrepreneurship by Sean Barrett, his disciples and supporters in promoting and achieving the deregulation of European aviation have been immense. This volume chronicles that historic process." Two of these disciples launched the book - former student and Ryanair CEO, Michael O'Leary and former Minister Desmond O'Malley, a parliamentary advocate of airline deregulation. He also contributed to the special 90th birthday edition of the Journal of Network Economics in honour of Alfred Kahn and is a member of the OECD round table of transport experts. In the last year he has also published at the Institute of Economic Affairs , London , on the Supreme Court decision on risk equalisation in the health insurance sector. His article on taxi deregulation has also been accepted for publication by the Institute. He is currently preparing a response to the Public Transport Regulation Bill, 2009.

Catia Batista and Gaia Narciso

Catia Batista and Gaia Narciso were awarded funding from the Norface research program for the project “Migration and Information Flows”. This project will entail conducting two surveys of immigrants in Ireland spaced over a one-year period. Between surveys, sampled immigrants will receive phone call credits and information from the first survey. The aim will be to measure how this experimental variation in information flows will affect the arrival of new immigrants, return migration decisions and remittance flows.

Dudley Cooke

Dudley Cooke's paper “Openness and Inflation” will be published next year in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.

Eleanor Denny

In 2009, Eleanor Denny published three peer-reviewed journal articles: “The Economics of Tidal Energy” and “The Impact of Carbon Prices on Generation Cycling Costs” in the Energy Policy journal and “Unit Commitment for Systems with Significant Wind Penetration” in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.  She also wrote an editorial for the Modern Energy Review published for the United Nations Framework on Climate Change.  In January 2009 she organised a one-day seminar on challenges facing the Irish Electricity Industry that was attended by over 150 academics and industry participants.

Vahagn Galstyan

Jointly with Philip R. Lane , Vahagn Galstyan is the author of “Fiscal Policy and International Competitiveness: Evidence from Ireland ,” Economic and Social Review (Autumn 2009) and “The Composition of Government Spending and the Real Exchange Rate,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (September 2009).

Philip R. Lane

In addition to his work with Vahagn Galstyan, his recent publications include “ A New Fiscal Strategy for Ireland,” Economic and Social Review (Summer 2009). He continues to work on fiscal topics, much of it in collaboration with postdoctoral fellow Agustin Benetrix.

In addition, his collaborative project with Jay Shambaugh ( Dartmouth College ) has yielded two forthcoming publications: “Financial Exchange Rates and International Currency Exposures,” American Economic Review, March 2010; and “ The Long or Short of It: Determinants of Foreign Currency Exposure in External Balance Sheets,” Journal of International Economics, forthcoming.

During 2009, he has been appointed as a managing editor of the journal Economic Policy. In addition, he has been appointed a member of the National Statistics Board and the Bellagio Group. He has also received a grant from Fondation Banque de France for the project “International Leverage.” He has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during 2009.

His PhD student Martin Schmitz has an article “ Financial Markets and International Risk Sharing ” forthcoming in Open Economies Review. Another PhD student Peter McQuade is an intern at DG-ECFIN during October 2009 to March 2010.

Finally, he is the founder of The Irish Economy blog which has become a popular forum for discussion and analysis of the Irish economy.

Antoin Murphy

Antoin Murphy has recently contributed to John Law: Économiste et homme d'état (Peter Lang, Brussels, 2007), pp. 447 and The Genesis of Macroeconomics: New Ideas from Sir William Petty to Henry Thrornton (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has also recorded two programmes on Scottish television concerning John Law: 1) BBC Scotland in the series 'Scots who Made the Modern World' and 2) Scottish Television (STV) in the series 'The Greatest Scot: Inventors and Entrepreneurs'. He recently recorded a programme for the Financial Channel of Chinese Television as part of a series on the power of the corporation. This programme will be broadcast in May 2010. He has also been contracted by the Liberty Fund to provide a new translation, along with an introduction, to Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en general.

John O'Hagan

John O'Hagan organised a conference on National Identity, Culture and the Wealth of Nations in April 2009; the conference proceedings (including his own paper) will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies this Autumn.

Three of John O'Hagan's students had notable successes in 2009. Christiane Hellmanzik had papers published in the European Economic Review and the Journal of Cultural Economics. Marta Zieba had a paper published in the Journal of Cultural Economics. Karol Borowiecki won the Best Poster Award at a conference in Linz in July 2009. Three other papers by graduate students are under review at journals.

John O'Hagan is involved in a major study of the History and Current Status of the Relationship of Trinity College with its neighbouring cultural institutions, with a second Workshop to be held in November 2009.

Kevin O'Rourke

In September 2009, Kevin O'Rourke became President of the European Historical Economics Society and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy this spring.

The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (2 volumes, edited by Stephen Broadberry and Kevin O'Rourke) will be published by Cambridge University Press in March 2010.

He recently published “Did Vasco da Gama matter for European markets?” Economic History Review (with Jeffrey G. Williamson) (2009). Dr Sibylle Lehmann, who was supervised by Kevin O'Rourke, is publishing two chapters of her thesis: "Chaotic Shop-Talk or Efficient Parliament? The Reichstag, the Parties, and the Problem of Governmental Instability in the Weimar Republic", Public Choice, forthcoming and "The German elections in the 1870s: who caused the turn towards protectionism?", Journal of Economic History, forthcoming.

Jacco Thijssen

In 2009, Jacco Thijssen published “Irreversible Investment and Discounting: An Arbitrage Pricing Approach”, In Press: Annals of Finance , doi: 10.1007/s10436-008-0108-4. He also received a grant for the project “Exploring the Fagel Collection: Early Modern Policymakers and the Library that Informed them” from the Long Room Hub Research Initiative Funding Scheme.

Pedro Vicente

Pedro Vicente's paper “Does Oil Corrupt? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in West Africa ” will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Development Economics. He has also earned a grant from the International Growth Centre to conduct research in Mozambique on political participation.

 

Sep 4, 2009

Professor Patrick Honohan appointed Governor of the Central Bank

Professor of International Financial Economics and Development, Patrick Honohan, has been appointed the next Governor of the Central Bank by the Minister for Finance, Mr. Brian Lenihan T.D. Professor Honohan will be the first academic to hold this post when he takes on the position later this month.

Patrick Honohan is Professor of International Financial Economics and Development in the Department of Economics. Previously he was a Senior Advisor in the World Bank working on issues of financial policy reform.  During the 1980s he was Economic Advisor to the Taoiseach and spent several years at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the Central Bank of Ireland.  A graduate of UCD and of the London School of Economics, from which he received his PhD in 1978, Professor Honohan has published widely on issues ranging from exchange rate regimes and purchasing-power parity, to migration, cost-benefit analysis and statistical methodology.

Announcing the Government's selection of Professor Honohan for the position of Governor, the Minister for Finance stated: “Professor Patrick Honohan is highly regarded internationally as an expert on banking and financial systems. His experience in the various positions he has held during his career, including the Central Bank, the World Bank and the academic world will be of enormous value to him in working through the difficulties which the Irish Financial System faces”.

“Throughout this financial crisis I have sought the views of Professor Honohan and he has consistently provided valuable advice. I look forward to working with him in his new role,” Minister Lenihan concluded.

Professor Patrick Honohan's full Curriculum Vitae may be viewed at http://www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/phonohan/

Aug 8, 2008

New Appointments to Lectureships, all from 1 September 2008

Catia Batista holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, an MSc from the Catholic University of Leuven and a BSc from the Portuguese Catholic University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she has been teaching graduate macroeconomics and international trade. Her research interests lie in the intersection of economic growth and international economics, with particular emphasis on capital flows and labour migration.

Eleanor Denny holds a BA in Economics and Mathematics and an MBS in Quantitative Finance from University College Dublin, and was awarded the 1999 Patrick Semple Medal in Economics. Following completion of her MBS, Eleanor worked as a power and energy financial analyst in the project finance department of KBC bank before commencing her PhD on the costs and benefits of wind generation. Eleanor is currently a Research Lecturer in the Electricity Research Centre at University College Dublin. Her research interests are in the area of renewable energy integration, electricity markets and energy policy.

Vahagn Galstyan holds a PhD in economics from Trinity College Dublin, and is currently a research fellow at the Institute for International Integration Studies. His primary field of interest is international macroeconomics, with research concentrating on the determinants of exchange rates.

Pedro Vicente holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago (2005) and an MSc (Econ.) from the London School of Economics. His undergraduate studies were at the Portuguese Catholic University . Pedro comes to us from the University of Oxford, where he is currently a research fellow and where he has been teaching graduate microeconomics and development economics. His research interests are in the field of the political economy of development, with a focus on field experiments.

Michael Wycherley holds a PhD in economics from the European University Institute in Florence and an MSc from the University of Southampton. He has spent the past year on a temporary contract at Trinity College Dublin, teaching undergraduate courses. His research interests are in macroeconomics and economic growth, with particular emphasis on technological innovation and adoption.

---------------------------------------------------------------

 

Jul 17, 2007

TCD Professor elected President-elect of European Historical Economics Society

Professor Kevin H. O'Rourke, Department of Economics, has been elected President-elect of the European Historical Economics Society. His term as President will be from 2009 to 2011.

Since its informal beginnings in the 1980s, the European Historical Economics Society has developed into the leading pan- European scholarly association in economic history. It has been registered since 1995 with the Charity Commissioners for England and Wales. Its aim is to promote research and teaching in European economic history, which it does by holding conferences and summer schools, and by publishing the Society journal, the European Review of Economic History (EREH).

The EREH, which has been published since 1997, and which Professor O'Rourke co-edited from 2003 to 2006, was recently admitted to the Social Science Citation Index, and has established a reputation as a leading international journal in the field.

Full article

Back to Top

 

---