The fourth in the series of sessions on the Irish economy will take place on January 27th. The venue is the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel Dublin City Center. It will take place between 9.30am and 5pm. Co-organisers are Liam Delaney, Colm Harmon and Stephen Kinsella. RSVPs to Emma.Barron@ucd.ie A full programme will be posted here shortly. There will be approximately 20 talks on a range of issues relevant to the current economic situation.
Author: Liam Delaney
Brian Lucey’s Irishdebate session from today is available at this link Brian ran it pretty much like an office hour fielding questions and it was a lively session with good questions. The questions asked to Brian are not visible on the screen as in the live version so some of the youtube video might be unclear but it is mostly easy to figure out what the questions were.
Description;
Professor in Finance Brian M Lucey will be discussing “Planning for a post Euro Economy” With every week that passes it is becoming unfortunately clear that under present arrangements the euro cannot continue. We have seen political dithering of the worst kind, persistently, with the resulting vacuum in terms of policy being taken up by the European Central bank. Although one can criticize the ECB for many of its activities (not least the bewildering refusal to contemplate the other side of the fence in relation to Anglo) is to its credit that has at least stepped into the breach. However of all of the European institutions it is probably the least democratic, as independent central banks have to be. Every ECB action, no matter how well-meaning, in the absence of political and therefore democratic-based approaches further undermines the democratic legitimacy of the euro. Trust in the ECB has and will continue to dwindle. In any case ECB intervention in bond markets has at best only a temporary effect, and it is ultimately up to governments at national and European level to implement policies that restore fiscal discipline. The academic research on bond yields is thus while in the short term like any asset they can be moved by speculative positions in the medium and long-term contract very well against economic fundamentals.
I did a video session on Irishdebate.com yesterday on unemployment. It is available here A blogpost with various links to material discussed during the session is here The session went through: the extent of unemployment in Ireland; consequences of long-run unemployment; current government responses; and potential responses.
The format is an interesting one and worth thinking about for others here as it gives more time to work through topics than is usually possible on television and radio. Joe Garde on Irishdebate.com sets them up. Ronan Lyons, Stephen Kinsella and others have done sessions on it so far.
As part of ongoing protests in the US, a group of Harvard students staged a walk-out from Greg Mankiw’s introductory Economics class. Mankiw links to their letter, the Harvard Crimson article on the matter and a letter of defence here. In total, according to Mankiw, about 5-10 per cent of the students walked-out, and a group of other students then walked in as counter-protesters. It is an interesting question as to how students who object to the way Economics is taught deal with this issue, and how universities respond to them.
Here is a VOX article on my joint work with James Smith and Mark McGovern on long-run determinants of health in Ireland. The extent to which decisions made in one decade have impacts on later ones is an important area of economics in terms of examining theoretical mechanisms and working out discounted values of public policies. The extent to which modern national policy-makers can target such obvious problems as infant deaths due to gastroenteritis is limited. However, there is still a strong role for looking at the long-run effects of policies aimed at improving, in particular, childhood mental health.