Metaphor and Maltese Art: Explorations in the Temple Period

Temple Period Malta in the 3rd millennium BC saw the production of a range of figurative and decorative art and architecture that implies a richly populated spiritual and cognitive world associated with ritual practice in life and death. The paper explores the potential to categorize the figurative art into distinct groups, and how these various images might represent aspects of the cosmology and social concerns of a prehistoric island society.

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.