This new Central Bank technical paper by Colin Bermingham and Thomas Conefrey seeks to establish the relation between external demand shocks and mortgage delinquencies in Ireland.
You can’t but admire the person who dubbed Times Higher Education.
The new THE University Rankings are out. Confirms earlier rankings: Ireland is slipping. I won’t repeat the whole discussion again. Just click on the “rankings” tag below to reread previous posts and comments. Here’s a summary: The metric is imperfect, but people base their decisions on it nonetheless.
Note that they changed their method again (for the better, although using Z-scores is statistically inappropriate for a Pareto distribution), so current and past ranks are incomparable.
University Rank 2011 (Rank 2010)
TCD 117 (76)
UCD 159 (94)
UCC 301-350 (>200)
NUIG 351-400 (>200)
NUIM 351-400 (>200)
The subject rankings will be published in two weeks (the PR genius was at it again).
The new IDEAS/RePEc data are out (economics only). Ireland is slipping there too. See graph. This cannot be explained by a drop in numbers. See graph. Liam Delaney and Kevin O’Rourke have left, Colm Kearney has announced his departure, and there will be more, but IDEAS/RePEc has yet to catch up with that.
Similarly, whatever people say in the media, austerity measures and employment control frameworks are likely to impact future university rankings, but I doubt they can explain much of the current rankings, as the objective measures (publications, citations) reflect the past rather than the present.
As with the QS rankings, reputation plays a big role. There is probably a spillover from bad news about Ireland in general to Irish universities specifically.
Media coverage:
Box 1.1 in the European REO covers labour market institutions. Relative to most European countries, Ireland comes across as having good labour market institutions. The box highlights one exception – the high unemployment benefit replacement rate for long-term unemployed. Note: the figure is based in 2008-2009 data and takes the average of net replacement rates over 60 months of unemployment for four family types and two earning levels (67 percent and 100 percent of average worker earnings), including social assistance. The box notes that Ireland’s replacement rate is relatively low at one-year duration but benefits are stable over time, making them higher than average over a fiver-year period.
The Infiniti conference has become a staple on the conference circuit in international finance because of the breadth of papers presented and the high quality of speakers it attracts, and the 2012 conference will be no different. Next year’s guest speakers will be Carmen Reinhart and Iftekhar Hasan.