President Signs Bank Stabilisation Bill Into Law

Irish Times story here.  Irish Examiner story here.

Did the Council of State really reassure the President of the Bill’s constitutionality?  Or is it that the risks of financial instability are seen (by the Council and/or the President) as outweighing constitutionality concerns?

Ajai Chopra: Conference Call

Here is the transcript of the press conference on Ireland.

Institutional Sector Accounts

The CSO has put out institutional sector accounts to end 2009: the release is here.

Assessing business schools and scholars (4)

The working paper is now available. Conclusions are by and large as before (2, 3), but details are different. This is the abstract:

The research performance of business scholars on the island of Ireland is evaluated based on their number of publication, number of citations, h-index and the same divided by the numbers of years since the first publication. Data were taken from Scopus. There is a large variation in both life-time achievement and annual production. Almost half of the 748 scholars have not published in an academic journal. Men perform better than women. More senior people perform better. There are distinct differences between disciplines, with accountancy performing poorly. On average, scholars in Northern Ireland perform better than scholars in the Republic. However, Trinity College Dublin has the top rank among the eleven business schools; Queen’s University Belfast and University College Dublin share the second place; and NUI Galway and the University of Ulster share the fourth spot. Irish business schools specialize in particular research areas so that mergers would lead to schools that can support a broader range of cutting-edge education.

This is the last opportunity to correct the data. (UPDATE: One name removed because of a legal threat.)

FT on climate policy

McDermott, Verde, Laing and Mejean take on Lomborg in the Financial Times.

As I have argued before, Lomborg plays a useful role in cooling down the overly ambitious climate policies promoted by European leaders — but he also tends to get his details wrong.