Geraldine Ryan

Irish stock returns and inflation: a long span perspective

A major issue in financial economics is the behaviour of stock returns over long as opposed to short horizons. This paper looks at the relationship between continuously compounded nominal returns and inflation over both short and long horizons. Using over two centuries of annual data for Ireland, this paper finds support for the Generalized Fisher Hypothesis; namely that real stock returns are independent of expected inflation over the long run, and a positive relationship between ex post long-horizon nominal stock returns and inflation.

Real economic activity leading indicators: should we have paid more attention?

The ability to predict business cycle activity is an invaluable skill for governments and policy makers alike, especially before an economy enters a downturn. We analyse causality relationships between key leading economic indicators and economic growth for three countries from 1970 to 2010. We find that while many indicators do not help explain current movements in GDP growth, lags of these indicators do. In addition, the direction of the change and the size of the change in the lagged economic indicators are very important in many cases. This is particularly true for housing indicators.

The role of stimulating employees’ creativity and idea generation in encouraging innovation behaviour in Irish firms

Abstract This paper analyses the impact of stimulating staff creativity and idea generation on the likelihood of innovation. Using data for over 3,000 firms, obtained from the Irish Community Innovation Survey 2008-2010, we examine the impact of six creativity generating stimuli on product, process, organisational and marketing innovation. Our results indicate that the stimuli impact the four forms of innovation in different ways. For instance, brainstorming and multidisciplinary teams are found to stimulate all forms of innovation, rotation of employees is found to stimulate organisational innovation, while financial and non-financial incentives are found to have no effect on any form of innovation. We also find that the co-introduction of two or more stimuli increases the likelihood of innovation more than implementing stimuli in isolation. These results have important implications for management decisions in that they suggest that firms should target their creative efforts towards specific innovation outcomes.