Welcome to my website. I am an Associate 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. My academic CV is at this link (PDF).
I am Director of Trinity Research in Social Sciences, a hub of over 300 research active social scientists in Trinity, and also Associate Director and Data Lead at the Centre for Economics, Politics 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.
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 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, Mongolia, 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 TheCurrency, having previously written for the Sunday Business Post and the Sunday Independent. Internationally, I am regularly interviewed on the Irish ecnomy — 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 due out in late 2025.
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.
Latest News
February 2025. "Judge for Yourself? The Impact of Controls on Rents in Interwar New York" (with Maximilian Günnewig-Mönert) is now Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Urban Economics.
February 2025. "Time to Build: Rules-based Planning and Residential Construction Project Duration in Dublin" (with Eamonn Sweeney) is now Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Housing Economics, Special Issue on Upzoning.
January 2025. "Estimating the flood risk discount: Evidence from a one-off national information shock" (joint with Tom Gillespie and Thomas McDermott) is now Accepted at Environmental & Resource Economics.
January 2025. "The Supply Side Effects of Rent Controls: Quasi-Experimental Evidence for Ireland" (joint with Tom Gillespie, Janez Kren and Conor O’Toole) is now Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Housing Economics.
October 2024. "The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890-2006" (joint with Allison Shertzer, Rowena Gray and David Agorastos) is now Revise & Resubmit at the Quarterly Journal of Economics.