Economic Policy Panel, October 2015

Papers are available here.

Garret FitzGerald Lecture and Autumn School

UCD College of Social Sciences and Law will host the Garret FitzGerald Lecture and Autumn School on Monday 19th October, in the UCD Sutherland School of Law. The daytime School (from midday) will focus on the significance of the social sciences. The evening Lecture will be delivered by Professor Cass R Sunstein,Harvard Law School, on the theme ‘Is Behavioural Science Compatible with Democracy?’. More details and bookings here.

Economists and the European democratic deficit

I have a column in Critical Quarterly, available here.

Ideological Differences between Economists

Scott Sumner provides a valuable discussion of the shifting ideological biases of American economists in this piece.

Potential output from a euro-area perspective

This ECB working paper is worth going through. The potential output calculation is very important for policy makers, because deviations from the economy’s potential output tend to form a large part of the evaluation of macroeconomic performance used by the European Commission and others. Two recent Central Bank working papers discuss the impact on the Irish economy of these measure. See here and here. The estimates have been, shall we say, fairly far off the mark. The chart below shows this. Understanding the potential output calculation is therefore really important when we talk about policy responses to changes in fiscal policy, especially at the EU level.