Welcome to my website. I am a Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin. My research focuses on housing markets, urban economics and economic history.
On this website, you can find out more about my research, my teaching and datasets I’ve helped create. You can download my academic CV (PDF, updated August 2026).
My book “Brittle: How the Housing Crisis Is Breaking Ireland – And How to Fix It”, by Atlantic Books, launches on 29 September, is in bookshops from 1 October, and is available to order here.
I am an internationally recognised expert on housing markets and housing price indices. Since 2004, I have been the author of the Daft.ie Reports, the longest-running series of sale and rental prices in Ireland. Since 2017, I have worked, on behalf of the IMF, training policymakers in South America, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia on how to measure housing price trends. I have also worked with numerous individual countries — including Bolivia, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam — building local expert capacity.
I am an active contributor to policy debates, especially on the topic of housing, and my research and commentary feature regularly in the media, both nationally and internationally. Nationally, I am a columnist at The Currency, having previously written for the Sunday Business Post and the Sunday Independent. Internationally, I am regularly interviewed on the Irish economy — past examples include the BBC, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, YLE (Finland), the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, Sky News, the New York Times and The Economist.
I have written a number of book chapters, including for the Economy of Ireland textbook, and in 2011, I was editor, with Ed Burke, of Next Generation Ireland. Together with my co-authors, Rowena Gray and Jason Barr, I am writing Rent & The City, a history of the (un)affordability of housing in New York over the last centuries. Commissioned by Columbia University Press, it is expected to be on the shelves in 2027.
Since 2022, I have been a PI, Associate Director and Data Lead at the Centre for Economics, Policy and History, a joint research hub between Trinity and Queen’s University Belfast, funded by the North-South Research Programme of the Government of Ireland. From 2019 to 2025, I was Director of Trinity Research in Social Sciences, a hub of over 300 research active social scientists in Trinity.
From 2021 to 2024, I was a member of Ireland’s Housing Commission, and for the period 2017-2022, I was a Board Member of Ireland’s Higher Education Authority. I have been a Council Member of the Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (SSISI) since 2017 and was Honorary Secretary for 2018-2021. From 2016 to 2022, I was on the Organising Committee of the Dublin Economic Workshop.
Recent News
September 2026. My book, Brittle: How the Housing Crisis Is Breaking Ireland – And How to Fix It, is launched on 29 September and is in bookshops from 1 October (Atlantic Books). Chapter-by-chapter sources and calculations are here.
September 2026. I was in Morocco on an IMF technical assistance mission, working with Bank Al-Maghrib on hedonic price indices for residential property.
August 2026. In The Currency, ‘Can the State get two million homes for €2bn?’ closed a three-part series on cost rental.
July 2026. ‘Watt’s it Worth? Residential Energy Efficiency Premiums’, joint with Hannah Ortega-McCormack, James Carroll and Tom Gillespie, has been published as a Central Bank of Ireland Staff Insight. Each step up the BER scale adds about 1.6% to a home’s value, a premium that fell from 1.9% in 2015 to 1.3% in 2024.
July 2026. On Substack, Part VI of 101 things we now know about US housing markets covers the postwar boom and the great divergence.
June 2026. New working paper with Tom Gillespie and Hannah Ortega-McCormack: ‘Measuring What Markets Price: LLM-Based Quality Measures and the Energy Efficiency Premium’.
June 2026. In The Currency, ‘More family homes than families’ set out why one tenure can no longer house Ireland.
May 2026. ‘Judge for Yourself? The Impact of Controls on the Rental Market in Interwar New York’, joint with Maximilian Günnewig-Mönert, has been published in the Journal of Urban Economics.
April 2026. In The Currency: ‘A two-speed housing market emerges’.
March 2026. With Allison Shertzer, I presented ‘Rental Prices and the Cost of Living in the United States, 1914-2006’ at the NBER-CRIW Conference on Measurement of Housing and the Housing Sector.
February 2026. With Tom Gillespie, I presented ‘How Much Do Text-Derived Quality Measures Matter? LLM-based variables and the robustness of residential property price indices’ at the International Conference on Real Estate Statistics in Tokyo.
January 2026. Eurofound has released a major new report on the Housing Struggles of Europe’s Youth, including a chapter I coauthored with Tom Gillespie and Kevin Hannigan estimating the housing deficit in four EU member states.
December 2025. ‘The supply side effects of rent controls: Evidence from Ireland’, joint with Janez Kren, Conor O’Toole and Tom Gillespie, has been published by the Journal of Housing Economics.
November 2025. I took part in Kilkenomics, the world’s first economics-and-comedy festival, contributing to a range of panels, including on the Economics of the Roman Empire.
October 2025. "The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890-2006" (joint with Allison Shertzer, Rowena Gray and David Agorastos) is now online at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Data available here.