Month: June 2013

Reminder: DEW Meeting, Land-Use Regulation in the United Kingdom

The Irish planning and land-use system is very similar to the set-up in the UK. There is a re-think under way across the water and one of the main contributors will be visiting;

Speaker: Christian Hilber (LSE)

Topic: The British System of Land-Use Regulation: Key Features and (unintended) Economic Consequences 

Date and Time: Friday June 28th at 5.30 pm

Venue: Davy Stockbrokers, 5th. floor, 49, Dawson St., Dublin 2.

Admission is free but you are requested to book – email Breeda.McRann@davy.ie

The Workshop is kindly sponsored this year by Dublin Chamber of Commerce.

From Gavin Kostick: Fishamble Presents ‘Guaranteed!’ by Colin Murphy

Gavin writes:

Fishamble: The New Play Company are presenting a new play. ‘Guaranteed!’, by Colin Murphy which dramatises the events leading up to and the night of the 2008 bank guarantee. You can read about it here

Colin is a journalist, documentary maker and researcher. People may know his columns from the Independent. In 2011 Fishamble launched ‘Tiny Plays for Ireland‘ with the Irish Times.

One of the plays that came in was Colin’s mini version of the guarantee. He came up to us afterwards and said he reckoned he could do a much more substantial work based on primary, secondary and interview sources. We said let’s go for it and Colin has done a fantastic job – he’s really put the work in.

We had a reading of it a couple of weeks ago and every scene that was
questioned Colin supported from a wide range of first hand interviews.

Colin has been scrupulously fair in not imposing hindsight on the people involved, so you get what it feels like to be in the room trying to make decisions in real time with the information you have. It’s funny too, in a tragic sort of way.

All the shows will be followed by discussion and we have a great line-up of various people on different nights with whom many readers will be familiar, including Kieran Allen, Suzy Byrne, Sarah Carey, Donal Donovan, Constantin Gurdgiev, Brian Lucey, Jim Power and many more. Bloggers are of course welcome to chip in with their insights.

The production has a great director, cast and crew. We’ve kept the prices down to and austerity friendly e10/11 and we’re doing it in a pop-up, script in hand way, which we hope reflects the idea of real people wading through the records trying to make sense of what happened.

I’ll be chairing a number of the discussions, so please feel free to stick in questions I should ask in the comments below.

Joint ESRI/Geary Institute Research Seminar: “Do Initial Endowments Matter only Initially? Birth Weight, Parental Investments and School Achievement”

Venue: The ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2

Date: 20/06/2013
Time: 4pm

Speaker: Prashant Bharadwaj, University of California, San Diego.

Abstract:
This paper investigates the role of initial health endowments on school achievement in early childhood through adolescence. Using birth weight as a proxy for childhood endowments, we investigate this link using twins and siblings fixed effects estimators. We collected birth weight and basic demographic data on all twins and siblings born in Chile between 1992-2000 and match these births to administrative school records between 2002-2008. Twins effects reveal that a 10% increase in birth weight improves performance in math by nearly 0.05 standard deviations in 1st grade.

We exploit repeated observations on twin pairs to show that the effect of birth weight is a persistent effect that does not deteriorate as children advance through grade 8. Siblings fixed effects estimators between grades 1 through 8 show a birth weight effect that declines as children age, but the decline is less among siblings closer together in age than among siblings who are further apart. OLS estimators also show a steady decline in the birth weight effect as children age: birth weight has a large effect in grade 1, but this effect diminishes significantly by grade 8.

Using data from a unique survey that asks both parents and children about parental investments relating to school work, we suggest parental investments as a plausible mechanism for the observed patterns in twins and siblings fixed effects estimators, and OLS. While parental investments are negatively correlated with birth weight, we find evidence of no differential care (by birth weight) within twin pairs; however, within siblings pairs and across families in general, the lower birth weight child appears to receive greater investments. Thus, it appears that parental investments that compensate for lower initial endowments can lessen the impact of birth weight on later life outcomes.

 

Prashant Bharadwaj is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in development and labor economics, focusing on the interactions between early childhood health, gender and education.

All welcome. No booking required.

IMF Completes Tenth Review Under the Extended Fund Facility Arrangement for Ireland and Approves €0.95 Billion Disbursement

here.

Lessons from the 1950s?

The institutional innovations over the deep crisis of the 1950s gave birth to the modern Irish economy. I analysed the process in this article  in the Irish Independent last week.  Brendan Keenan re edited it slightly to highlight his interpretation of what I was saying. One of the fascinating things about writing anything is how it takes on a life of its own in readers’ minds.   (“And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us”).  Edna Longley once destroyed the meaning of something I had written by aggressive editing; fortunately no such problems arise with Brendan.  I wrote a similar piece for historyhub.ie, a new site developed by a group of young historians.  Though I disagree with much of what Bryce Evans has to say on Lemass, I found his interpretation of what I had written illuminating: “it makes the case very convincingly for expertise offered as a basis for policy-making being more robustly based on both independence and breadth of opinion.”