Staff Research Interests

Academic Staff: Research Interests and Topics Relevant to Postgraduate Research Students: 2012 -2013

Below are the research interests of the staff in the Department of Economics, and economists in other departments who are interested in supervising PhD students registered in the Department of Economics. In some cases, staff members have indicated specific projects which not only interest them but also for which they may have funding for PhD students. Please contact them directly if you are interested.

Supervisor: Professor Sean Barrett

Email: sean.barrett@tcd.ie

• Economics of public policy
• Transport economics

Supervisor:Professor Agustin Bénétrix

Email: benetria@tcd.ie

Agustín Bénétrix specialises in applied international macroeconomics. He is happy to supervise graduate students in the following areas:

• Financial globalisation: determinants and economic effects of capital flows and investment positions; current account dynamics; sudden stops; international financial exposures; financial exchange rates; international risk sharing
• Fiscal policy in open economies: short- and long-run effects of fiscal shocks on output composition, exchange rates and employment; debt sustainability and debt consolidation; link between fiscal cycle and financial cycle; link between commodity prices and fiscal performance
  
  

Supervisor: Professor Eleanor Denny

Email: dennye@tcd.ie

Eleanor Denny’s area of research interest is in Energy Economics, in particular on the impact of large penetrations of renewables on electricity systems. She is currently supervising/co-supervising PhD students in the following areas:

• The economic viability of large scale energy storage to balance wind generation
• The cost impact of variable renewable generation on the underlying electricity generation portfolio
• The economics of biomass for electricity production
• The distributional impacts of a carbon tax
• Stochastic optimisation of the electricity market with wind generation
• The economics of electric vehicles

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Supervisor: Professor Vahagn Galstyan

Email: v.galstyan@tcd.ie

Vahagn Galstyan joined the Department of Economics in September 2008. His primary field of interest is international macroeconomics, with research concentrating on the determinants of exchange rates.

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Supervisor: Professor Fadi Hassan

Email:fhassan@tcd.ie

Fadi Hassan is an applied macroeconomist with interests in development macroeconomics and international economics. The bulk of my research focuses on macroeconomic dynamics of developing countries: the behavior of the real exchange rate along the development process, the relationship between structural change and real exchange rate, the effects of foreign capital flows on income inequality.
I would be happy to supervise students in the area of international/development macroeconomics. 

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Supervisor: Professor Michael King

Email: michael.king@tcd.ie

Michael King specialises in applied development economics and has research interests in banking and financial sector development. He is open to hearing from potential students who wish to pursue research degrees in the following areas.

• Access to financial services: Topics including the impact and dynamics of access to formal savings and credit products, microfinance, mobile banking, SME finance, financial literacy and other barriers to financial access.
• Microeconomics of development: Topics including political economy, governance, education and poverty.
• Banking and financial sector development: Topics including banking systems, competition, regulation and financial innovation

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Supervisor: Professor Philip Lane

Email: plane@tcd.ie

Philip Lane has currently seven PhD students working in the international macroeconomics area. Below are three topics that may interest perspective students.

• Financing Public Investment: A Macro Perspective. In recent years, Europe has been subject to fiscal austerity in order to satisfy the EMU Maastricht criteria. In some fast-growing countries, it may be appropriate to increase the volume of public investment spending. This raises the question: how should public investment be financed? This project will assess the optimality of the Golden Rule (bywhich investment spending should be debt-financed);public-private partnerships; and the idea of a stand-alone investment 'fund'. The analysis will include not only economic factors but due attention will also be helpful in 'ring-fencing' fiscal surpluses from consumption-happy politicians.
• Managing the Public Debt: Is an Independent Agency Appropriate? In Ireland, the public debt is managed by an independent agency (the National Treasury Management Agency). This project will evaluate the pros and cons of delegating this important component of fiscal policy and employ Ireland as a case study. Issues include: coordination problems with the Department of Finance and the Central Bank; setting an appropriate portfolio benchmark; agency issues (optimal incentive structures); and the question of whether assets should be held as well as liabilities.
• Output Volatility Business cycles are more severe in some countries than in others; a one per cent drop in GDP is a rare event in the OECD, yet developing countries often suffer declines in excess of five per cent. This project will study the determinants of volatility in a cross-section of countries, examining the effects of income level; trade openness; country size; output specialization and natural resource endowments, to list just a few relevant factors.
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Supervisor: Professor Ronan Lyons

Email: Ronan.Lyons@tcd.ie

Ronan Lyons has two general areas of research focus: economic geography and economic history. He is happy to supervise students who are interested in any of the following five areas:

• European Property Markets - including the Irish housing bubble/crash, European property market cycles, the interaction between housing and labour markets, and cross-border housing markets
• Amenity Valuation - house prices can tell us a lot about how private households value non-market services, such as access to environmental amenities (e.g. coastline, forests), culture & heritage (e.g. national monuments), transport and energy facilities (e.g. new train stations, motorways, wind turbines, power lines), and public services (e.g. schools)
• Sustainable and Behavioural Real Estate - how is energy efficiency capitalized into property values, and what does that tell us about how households behave economically? Using the housing market, what can we tell about the impact on behaviour of factors such as information, uncertainty, reference points, balance sheet effects, risk and loss aversion?
• Long-run income, wealth and prices - the past is the only laboratory for economists and the field of cliometrics (quantitative economic history) is now well established. I'm happy to supervise students interested in constructing and analysing long-run trends in wages, property prices/rents, equity prices, other asset prices (e.g. interest rates or government bonds), and indeed commodity prices, particularly where these may contribute to a better understanding of Ireland's long-run economic development (pre-, during and post-Union with Britain).
• Returns to skill and other factors - this includes analysis of the ratio of wages of high- and low-skilled workers over the long-run and across countries, and the ratio between wages and other factor returns (such as rents and interest rates).

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Supervisor: Professor Tara Mitchell

Email: mitchet@tcd.ie

Tara Mitchell specialises in applied microeconomics with a particular focus on questions relating to development economics. She is happy to supervise students in any area of development economics but is particularly interested in areas relating to agriculture and the economics of information.

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Supervisor: Professor Gaia Narciso

Email: narcisog@tcd.ie

Gaia Narciso joined the Department of Economics in September 2007. She is happy to supervise students in the area of Development Economics, International Migration and Political Economy.

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Supervisor: Professor Carol Newman

Email: newmanc@tcd.ie

Carol Newman specialises in applied microeconomics and, in particular, its application to development economics.

She is happy to supervise students interested in studying the micro-foundations of economic development. Possible areas include household behaviour, the behaviour of micro, small and medium sized enterprises, rural market failures (agricultural markets, financial markets, land markets, etc), migration, industrialisation, industry agglomeration and trade.

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Supervisor: Professor Charles Normand (School of Medicine)

Email: charles.normand@tcd.ie

Charles Normand’s research work specializes in the economics of health and he has at present four PhD students working under his supervision. The topics of possible interest to graduate students are the following.

• Economic impact of population ageing, especially in relation to health services in Ireland. A study currently underway is exploring the impact of demographic change on health and social care in Ireland. This is showing that population ageing is likely to be less important than other socio-economic factors such as rising incomes and expectations. Some new data will be soon available from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA).
• There may also be opportunities to work on economic aspects of chronic disease management and equity in finance and access to health care.

There may be funding for one studentship through the Health Research Board Scholar Programme in Health Services Research. In other cases those with funding might still opt to take the taught programme for the Scholar Programme.

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Supervisor: Professor John O’Hagan

Email: johagan@tcd.ie

John O’Hagan’s research interests relate to the economics of the arts and culture, using quantitative and case study methods. He has currently five PhD students working in this area, two on the estimation of demand/participation functions for the performing arts and the other on patterns and causes of clustering of visual artists and composers by work location. The areas of research where research funding might be forthcoming are the following.

• Clustering and innovation. Do the more important artists (visual, literary, composers) tend to cluster in certain geographic locations, historically and today? If so, why do they cluster at all and what is the evidence for this? And why the specific locations? This work will involve using large on-line dictionaries of art and knowledge of either German or Italian would be useful. It is hoped to be able to test most of the explanations using regression analysis and some ‘creative’ work will be required to uncover the data that will allow this to happen.
• Econometric estimation of determinants of participation in and willingness to pay for the arts. There is access to large data sets for this work, both national and international. As such, this work will involve detailed multivariate and statistical analysis. It will also develop new ways of trying to measure the connection, if any, between active participation and social cohesion and well-being, a topic of considerable interest to many European governments.

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Supervisor: Professor Francis O'Toole

Email: fotoole@tcd.ie

• Microeconomics
• Taxation
• Industrial organization theory

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Supervisor: Professor Paul Scanlon

Email: scanlop@tcd.ie

Paul Scanlon is happy to supervise students focusing on any area of macroeconomics, broadly construed. Two areas in particular interest him, as follows.

• There has been a lot of debate on the US/European differential in average hours per person (and worker), since Edward Prescott’s (2002) study on the topic. However, there has been comparatively little work on trends within countries. In particular, does the average discrepancy arise from differentials across high income workers or low income workers, or is it uniform across all income levels? One paper that touches on these issues is "Understanding Growth and Inequality Trends: The Role of Labor Supply in the USA and Germany” by Lars Osberg, but this is an area that is a fruitful topic for research.
• An empirical paper "Does Inflation Targeting Matter?” by Lawrence Ball and Niamh Sheridan, examines the effects of inflation targeting on real and nominal variables. Basically, they find small effects, claiming that any positive effects of inflation targeting would have happened in any case. However, there is little reason to believe this to be the case – inflation is notoriously persistent. Given the relevance and importance of the topic, and more data since the initial study, a revision of this study seems timely and worthwhile.

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Supervisor: Professor Andrew Somerville

Email: andrew.somerville@tcd.ie

• Theoretical and applied microeconomics
• Financial economics

Supervisor: Professor Michael Wycherley

Email: wycherlm@tcd.ie

Michael Wycherley joined the Department of Economics in September 2007. His research interests are in macroeconomics and economic growth, with particular emphasis on technological innovation and adoption, and he is happy to advise students in these areas.

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