Table 1 shows the growth rates of output volume, population and employment in Ireland over various periods since 1926. I take the last period, 1993-2000, as the Celtic Tiger phase. In 1993, total employment was just back to the 1980 level after the large fall in the first half of the 1980s during the worldwide recession following the second oil crisis, and the 1993 level was still 7 percent bel...

In this paper, we show that large inflows into commodity investments, a recent phenomenon known as financialization, has changed the behavior and dependence structure between commodities and the general stock market. The common perception is that the increase in comovements is the result of distressed investors selling both assets during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We show that financial di...

This paper develops a simple bank-based analytical framework to explain why and how capital inflow surges and lending booms could lead to higher real interest rates in the domestic economy, even after adjusting for country/currency risk premia and exchange rate changes. While this phenomenon of ever-rising capital inflows and sustained possibly, even widening interest rate spreads is an importa...

Sometimes, as a result of disasters, it is possible to view things happening underneath the surface in society. This was a finding of my research on pollution problems when I lived in Japan in the early 1970s. At that time, I coauthored a book on Japan’s environmental crisis, with the title of Island of Dreams (‘Yume no shima’) – as a metaphor for what was happening then. A similar phenomenon i...

Suicide terrorism is an international problem that endangers the well-being of whole populations. Standard explanations suggest that religious fanaticism is a primary driving force in the generation of suicide bombers. A growing body of empirically based scholarship, however, indicates that suicide terrorism is a multifactorial phenomenon that cannot easily be explained away as an outcome of re...

Using particle system methodologies we study the propagation of financial distress in a network of firms facing credit risk. We investigate the phenomenon of a credit crisis and quantify the losses that a bank may suffer in a large credit portfolio. Applying a large deviation principle we compute the limiting distributions of the system and determine the time evolution of the credit quality ind...

The article provides a description of a solution-focused approach to crisis intervention with adolescents. A description of common developmental and environmental factors that may result in crises for adolescents is presented, followed by an overview of solution-focused therapy. Similarities between solution-focused therapy and strength’s-based crisis intervention and intervention with adolesce...

Crowd employment platforms in Spain are a rather recent development. However, they have experienced remarkable growth during the economic crisis. The number of workers and clients has increased in the sectors already using crowd employment (including creative design), and the phenomenon has spread to other sectors such as housing and design, computing, book editing and translation (InfoCrowdsou...

Many of the papers in this special issue are concerned with regulation and some with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). In this commentary, I will begin by summarizing the arguments for regulation that have been made in the literature.1 I will then consider whether these arguments apply to SOX. I will suggest that, rather than being based on sound principles, regulation often seems to be a consequen...

The development of mountain tourism in Greece is a recent phenomenon and one that has been affected by the economic crisis. Key factor to its development was the ski resorts that spread through the country especially in the last twenty years. The present paper focuses on a ski resort in Greece, Elatochori Pierias, attempting to assess the impact of mountain tourism on the sustainable developmen...