About

I am an Associate Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin, where my primary research areas are housing markets, urban economics, and economic history. I am particularly interested in long-run housing markets, in order to better understand current housing experiences such as rapidly increasing housing costs in many high-income cities, and in Ireland’s path to economic development, from the 16th century through to today. You can find out more about my research either here or at my profiles on RePEc or Google Scholar. At Trinity, I am also Director of TRiSS, a multidisciplinary hub for over 300 research-active social scientists across eight schools in Trinity; the goals of TRiSS are to enable Trinity’s social scientists to undertake new and exciting research and to maximise the impact of that research. I am also a Research Associate at the Spatial Economics Research Centre in LSE and economist for daft.ie, Ireland’s largest real estate listings website. Through this latter role, I am author of the quarterly Daft.ie Reports on Ireland’s sale and rental housing markets.

Prior to starting at Trinity, I was a doctoral student at Balliol College, Oxford, from 2009 to 2013, where my doctoral thesis covered the economics of Ireland’s recent property market bubble and crash. Before this, I worked in both private and public sectors. After serving briefly as a Junior Diplomat with Irish Aid in 2005/2006, I was economist for Ireland’s National Competitiveness Council and a policy analyst at Forfás, Ireland’s enterprise policy advisory board in 2006 and 2007. From 2007 to 2009, I was a Managing Consultant at the IBM Center for Economic Analysis, part of IBM’s business think-tank, the Institute for Business Value. My work involved research and analysis on issues of importance to economic development, including the socioeconomic impact of ICT, emerging markets, environmental challenges and the global economic recession. My work with daft.ie began in 2004, when I set up the Economic Research unit at daft.ie and, since then, I have been responsible for the quarterly reports on Ireland’s residential sales and lettings markets. The Daft Report has grown to become one of the most widely cited economic reports in the country.

If you’re interested in what makes me tick, I seem to have always been interested in economic affairs. My earliest idea was when I was six or seven: I wanted to become an architect so that I could design six buildings employing 50,000 each, thus solving Ireland’s then unemployment crisis! (If only it were that simple…) About ten years later, I started a degree in Economics & Political Science in Trinity College, Dublin and I was elected a Scholar of the College in 2000 and subsequently graduated with a first class joint honours degree, a first-class honours M.Sc. in Economics and a research-based M.Litt. in Economics, where my thesis with Kevin O’Rourke was on the relationship between labor market inequality and its determinants, including deglobalization, unionization and industrial change.

I set this site up originally in 2008, to have a place to examine economic issues of interest to me, including the Irish economy, the world economy and property markets. It now serves mainly as a repository of my published and work-in-progress research, and articles and commentaries I wrote elsewhere, including the Sunday Independent (where I had a weekly column 2015-2018) and the Daft.ie Report. A few other bits and pieces:

• I am one of five Principal Investigators (PIs) at the new Centre for Economics, Policy & History, a HEA-funded cross-border centre, and have been, since 2014, one of the convenors of the annual Irish Quantitative History workshop.
• I am a Member of the Housing Commission, which was set up in 2021 and will report in mid-2023 to the Government on how best to design housing policy over the medium/long term to deliver a health housing system.
• Since 2016, I have been part of the organising committee of the Dublin Economics Workshop (which organises the annual DEW Conference in White’s of Wexford, previously known as the Kenmare Conference).
• With the Trinity Online Education team, I also run an online course in the Economics of the Property Market. The course is aimed both at professionals, including policymakers, who work day-to-day with housing but who may not have the economics background, and at the general public.
• From 2017 to 2022, I was a Member of the Higher Education Authority, which is responsible for the strategic development of the Irish higher education and research system and for the effective governance and regulation of higher education institutions and the higher education system.
• From 2018 to 2022, I was Honorary Secretary of the Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland.
• Some of what I post here is cross-posted at irisheconomy.ie.
• Students looking forward materials relating to these courses are directed to Trinity’s Blackboard system.
• If you are interested in learning more about professional advice and consultancy, please see this part of my website.
• If you’d like to contact me, click here. You can also connect with me on twitter or LinkedIn.

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PS. While economics is the primary focus of my attentions and thus of my website, I am also interested in and post about genealogy, technology, politics and a few other bits and pieces, which are hidden away here. I have a separate genealogy site, on myheritage.com, with lots more information on my family tree, if that’s of interest.