Irish Credit Unions: Investigating performance determinants and the opportunity cost of regulatory compliance

The study investigates how producer-specific environmental factors influence the performance of Irish credit unions. The empirical analysis uses a two-stage approach. The first stage measures efficiency by a data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimator, which explicitly incorporates the production of undesirable outputs such as bad loans in the modelling, and the second stage uses truncated regression to infer how various factors influence the (bias-corrected) estimated efficiency. A key finding of the analysis is that 68% of Irish credit unions do not incur an extra opportunity cost in meeting regulatory guidance on bad debt.

Post-release GPS tracking of hand-reared Irish hare Lepus timidus hibernicus leverets, Slemish, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.

Animal rescue centres release large numbers of captive-bred, rehabilitated or translocated animals into the wild annually but little is known about their post-release survival and behaviour. We developed a novel and innovative coupling of traditional radio-tags with new GPS loggers to track hand-reared Irish hare Lepus timidus hibernicus leverets after release into the wild. Cyanoacrylate SuperGlue® proved a poor fixative with two out of three leverets managing to detach their tags within 24 hours. Nevertheless, a total of 2,505 GPS locations were recorded every 60 seconds for one leveret over three nights (approx. 835 per night). The leveret dispersed