iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Ireland has overtaken another EU member state, in population, for the first time since joining the EEC back in 1972. At current trends, Ireland will overtake Finland in 2028. (And Scotland maybe in 2027, just about.)

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Great opportunity to resurface this after nearly two years

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Looks like I picked the right afternoon to free up my schedule

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

As part of the piece, I look at Ireland's share of Europe's population since 1500, using overlapping Maddison and UN data. If even 1700 - not to mention 1750, 1800 or 1840 - represented 'steady state' for the island, it is still significantly under-populated, notwithstanding the last three decades.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Delighted to have been elected to Fellow of @tcddublin.bsky.social, together with my wonderful colleague @davideromelli.bsky.social. And what a day for it!

Photograph of Davide Romelli and Ronan Lyons in Trinity College, having been elected as Fellows.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Looks like I picked the right week to start reading Galbraith...

A photograph of 'The Great Crash, 1929' by J K Galbraith

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Not as pretty as John's graph (that's always a high bar) but here you can see the Irish equivalent Uncertainty Index, up to March. I've no doubt the April figure will match global trends. This comes from the excellent work of Jonathan Rice. www.policyuncertainty.com/ireland_rice...

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

The internet at its best. Four great penguin memes (that none of us would have got, even 24 hours ago)

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Our first paper using that dataset looks at what we know now about US housing markets over the long-run that we didn't before: they went up by more than previously thought, in ways linked to the supply of homes and of credit.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

Agreed. I wrote a piece not that long ago calculating the ratio of arrivals to hotel beds for Dublin over the last two decades - in short, the city needs an extra 10,000 hotel beds (+50%) and yet bizarrely keeps refusing new proposals while also bemoaning Airbnb. thecurrency.news/articles/142...

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

A fascinating list of newspapers in Ireland (and how often they were published), from 1850. The number of newspapers in the country was as high as 25 in 1800, hit 66 by 1830 and was almost 100 by the middle of the century. #irishhistory

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

No doubt you saw Brett's chart but I found it a handy way of gathering thoughts (and, I hasten to add, I don't like excessive focus on RWCs, I just picked two years hence as it's far enough away and close enough!) - one or two positions in particular look thin but better than I might have thought.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Unfortunately, your facts don't fit the narrative.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Nobody does better Valentine's Day cards than six year olds to their best friends.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Presented, without comment, a clip from Farmer's Gazette and Journal of Practical Horticulture - this month 165 years ago.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

2/ But Trinity had - and still has - an arrangement with both Oxford and Cambridge known as "ad eundem" (or incorporation), where each recognises the others' degrees. The Provost at the time saw no reason to exclude women from the process - accidentally creating the phenomenon of 'Steamboat Ladies'!

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

How did @tcddublin.bsky.social end up owning Trinity Hall? A somewhat random story for a Friday. Back in the early 1900s, Oxford and @tcddublin.bsky.social were the last two universities in the then UK to refuse to admit women. In 1904, Trinity relented, admitting women for the first time. 🧵

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Looking forward to a piece on the economics of The History of the History of Economics Society next!

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Just a little shout-out to my grandmother, pictured here on her honeymoon in England, who died 60 years ago today. Her young-ish death meant that I never met her. I remember her seeming a very distant figure when I was little... but now 15 years does not seem long at all!

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

8/ To do this, we combined state-of-the-art methods, detailed data from historical newspapers and a unique setting to get at causal effects. We digitized over 16,000 rental listings from NYC newspapers 1918-1930 and mapped them. And the results of the analysis were crystal clear!

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

7/ We use the fact that these court districts had sharp boundaries, unrelated to other features of economic geography, to test whether crossing from a "pro-tenant" Democrat district into a "pro-landlord" Republican one had any impact on rents paid.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

6/ But the system of rent controls brought in by NYC was not the technocratic system New Yorkers will be familiar with today. Instead, it gave judges the power to decide which rent increases were reasonable. Not only that, judges were elected, creating a strong incentive for ideological judges.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

5/ New York, which had what one commentator called a 'housing famine' as WW1 ended, was the first major city in the US to introduce rent controls. The move, in April 1920, was in response to a horrendous spike in market rents, shown in the graph below: rents in 1920 were 150% higher than in 1915.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Always a pleasure to teach in this amazing building in @tcddublin.bsky.social, even if it's my last time this academic year. One of Dublin's hidden gems.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Doing a little bit of research on Ireland's ill-fated introduction of rent controls back in 2016 (still there and still not working) and I managed to dig up a transcript of the key meeting...

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

As good as time as any to state that, with vanishingly few exceptions, you've only one message per chart, right? (cc @peck.phd)

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I feel like this meme is something of an evergreen - and not just in Ireland.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Over on 'the other place', Mick Byrne has this really useful summary of Irish political parties' housing policies, ahead of #ge24. Stunning that, ten years into a chronic and worsening shortage of rental homes, not a single major political party has any plans to increase supply.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

W̵e̵ ̵a̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵f̵i̵r̵s̵t̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵e̵x̵a̵m̵i̵n̵e̵.̵.̵.̵ ̵W̵e̵ ̵c̵o̵n̵t̵r̵i̵b̵u̵t̵e̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵a̵n̵ ̵e̵m̵e̵r̵g̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵l̵i̵t̵e̵r̵a̵t̵u̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵a̵t̵ ̵e̵x̵a̵m̵i̵n̵e̵s̵.̵.̵.̵ A well-established literature examines...

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Definite Lionel Hutz feel as I undertake a literature review for a new paper... "Wow, there's lots of useful and interesting research out there!" #econsky

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Post a pic YOU took (no description) to bring some zen to the timeline

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Allison and I have a particular interest in land use restrictions so we looked at the relationship between price growth and regulatory constraints (measured by the Wharton index after 2000). The two are positively correlated once cities are zoned but the correlation gets steeper after 1981. 16/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

We also discuss the missed rental price inflation of the RoPR series after both World Wars and 1965-1985. Bottom line: our results suggest that nominal rents rose by the same factor as wider prices (x25) from 1914-2006 instead of by much less (x10). 15/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Even ignoring maintenance and depreciation, stocks were a better bet than housing in virtually every city, particularly after 1980. The only exception was just after the Great Depression, most cities saw rental returns that were higher than the S&P500. 14/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

If you had a time machine, you could use the HHP data to invest in real estate (see Table 2). Charleston and Cleveland had high returns before the Great Depression. Rental yields were good in many cities between 1930-1945. Portland was always a good bet. 13/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Gross rental yields were highly volatile but cycled around 7% from 1890-1970. They have been falling ever since. We plot the series of Davis Lehnert and Martin (1960-) for reference. 12/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

What about the performance of housing as an asset? We compute, for the first time, the annual rental return and capital gain for each city over the period. Here is the nominal national series. Rental returns were more important than capital gains until after 1975. 11/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

With both market rent and sales price indices, there is much we can learn about U.S. housing markets over the 20th century. For instance, we can see, for the first time, how market rents and sales prices have moved with the business cycle over the long run. 10/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Next, sales. Because of data limitations, the pioneering Shiller index does not capture the interwar housing cycle or real housing price growth before the mid-1990s. The HHP series has both and matches up with other sources such as the census. 9/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

But rental trajectories have varied a lot by city. Some cities do exhibit the real falling rents trend in the BLS, such as Detroit and Cleveland. Philly is flat across nearly the whole period. Seattle rents have been increasing in real terms since 1915. 8/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

The RoPR series shows rental price levels falling in real terms by nearly half from 1914-2006 (lots of methodological reasons, see paper). We find real market rents increased by about 20% over the whole period, but growth was 0% nationally as recently as 1975. 7/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

[Technical note – we are using hedonic regressions to construct these indices and “rolling windows” to address housing quality changes. We also control for housing unit size, type, and location in city from the ads. See paper for details.] 5/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Bottom line: relative to existing series, we find a lot more inflation-adjusted rental price growth and a bit more sales price growth over the 20th century. For rents, the missed growth is after both World Wars and 1965-1985. For sales it is 1955-1980. 4/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Delighted to share that the Historical Housing Prices (HHP) Project has launched, with new sales and market rental housing price indices for U.S. cities spanning 1890-2006. This collaboration with Allison Shertzer and Rowena Gray uses newspaper real estate sections. A thread... 1/n

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 01/02/2024

Dublin graffiti that spoke to me (or brought me back two decades, take your pick).

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 24/11/2023

Macro, applied micro, Game theory, econ history.

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Ronan Lyons @ronanlyons.bsky.social · 07/11/2023

In my latest piece, I explore Ireland's long-run trajectory. Ireland seems to be in the middle of a 60-year surge in homes needed - comparable only to Ireland's long boom of the 18thC. If we get it right 2020s-2040s, far fewer new homes will be needed 2050s-2090s. thecurrency.news/articles/133...

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