Eoghan Garvey

Social capital, life expectancy and mortality: a cross-national examination.

This paper analyses the relationship between social capital and population health. The analysis is carried out within an econometric model of population health in 19 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries using panel data covering three different time periods. Social capital is measured by the proportion of people who say that that they generally trust other people and by membership in voluntary associations. The model performs well in explaining health outcomes. We find very little statistically significant evidence that the standard indicators of social capital have a positive effect on population health. By contrast, per capita income and the proportion of health expenditure financed by the government are both significantly and positively associated with better health outcomes. The paper casts doubt upon the widely accepted hypothesis that social capital has a positive effect on health and illustrates the importance of testing this kind of hypothesis in an extended model.

Investigating the Determinants of Relative Economic Performance for Irish Towns: A Finite Mixture Modelling Approach

Cullinan J., Garvey E. and Keane M. Investigating the determinants of relative economic performance for Irish towns: a finite-mixture modelling approach, Regional Studies. This paper uses a finite-mixture modelling approach to investigate the likely determinants of relative economic performance for Irish towns. The main argument put forward is that determinants of success can act in different ways for different groups of towns and the modelling approach differentiates towns on the basis of their relationship between performance measures and likely performance determinants. The results suggest that determinants of success such as centrality and road quality, capacity and functional score, as well as the population size of supporting and competing hinterlands have very different impacts on different groups of towns, highlighting heterogeneity in the way in which different factors impact economic performance.

The inadequacy of cost of living indices based on subjective preferences: an ethical and methodological critique

In this paper we argue that there is scant justification for replacing the traditional fixed‐basket Laspeyres price index with so called ‘true cost of living indices’. We begin with a discussion of the possible explanations for some empirical results for inflation found for different social groups in Ireland in the late 1990s. Our arguments concerning appropriate inflation indices are primarily ethical and are not dependent on these results being interpreted in a non‐neoclassical vein. They do however gain extra force if one accepts non‐neoclassical explanations for the empirical results. We go on to draw conclusions as to how best to measure the welfare effects of changes in the price of goods. This links in to the broader debate regarding objective versus subjective measures of welfare.