Quarterly Economic Commentary Winter 2019

No Abstract

Assessing the impacts of COVID-19 on the Irish property market: An overview of the issues. ESRI QEC Special Article September 2020.

In this paper we examine some of the potential channels through which COVID-19 is likely to impact the Irish housing market and discuss some policy areas which may need refocusing or re-evaluation. Building on existing work by ESRI researchers, we examine the implications under the headings of housing demand, housing supply, affordability of prices and the rental market. While there is likely to be a significant number of effects across a wide variety of headings, the most long-lasting impact of the crisis is the potential exacerbation of the imbalance between housing demand and supply which already exists in the market. The most efficient policy response in that context is for an increase in the State provision of social and affordable housing over the short to medium term

The RTB Rent Index, Quarter 3 2020. ESRI Indices Report December 2020.

This report is produced by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) and the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and provides rental indicators (the Rent Index) generated to track price developments in the Irish market. The analysis in this report presents rental indices on a quarterly basis covering the period between Q3 2007 and Q3 2020. It must be noted that the period since the onset of the pandemic has seen the introduction and easing of restrictions around rental price growth in line with the public health measures. This is likely to have had an effect on the trend between the second and third quarters

Comparing sample surveys of health with official population statistics: some methodological issues and empirical findings

This article reports an examination of factors that might affect the interpretation of computed relative risks of medical illness obtained when estimates of morbidity derived from a specific subpopulation sample are compared with estimates obtained from official statitical bureau surveys of the parent population. Interpreting a significant or nonsignificant relative risk depends upon how fair the comparison is. Three types of error are considered: (1) those arising from subjects, including coverage, selection, response and comparability; (2) those arising from measurement processes, including data collection instruments, interviewers and data processing; and (3) those arising from confounding, which occurs when a risk factor for outcome is differentially distributed between exposure groups. An example is given from a comparison of two sets of morbidity estimates, one obtained from an epidemiological cohort study of a national random list sample of Australian Vietnam veterans, the other obtained by an Australian Bureau of Statistics national area probability sample. Variables measuring prevalence of 37 recent and chronic illness conditions were derived from both studies and their ratio computed as the relative risk of illness in the veteran sample compared with the Australian population sample. This risk was greater than 1.0 for all except one condition, and 18 of 36 recent conditions and 30 of 37 chronic conditions carried 99% confidence intervals excluding 1.0. Adjustment for variables that were thought to have potentially biased the relative risks gave varied results. The issue of when an adjustment becomes an overadjustment depends upon the meaning of the variable and its place in a putative causal pathway

Implicit Neural Head Synthesis via Controllable Local Deformation Fields

High-quality reconstruction of controllable 3D head avatars from 2D videos is highly desirable for virtual human applications in movies, games, and telepresence. Neural implicit fields provide a powerful representation to model 3D head avatars with personalized shape, expressions, and facial parts, e.g., hair and mouth interior, that go beyond the linear 3D morphable model (3DMM). However, existing methods do not model faces with fine-scale facial features, or local control of facial parts that extrapolate asymmetric expressions from monocular videos. Further, most condition only on 3DMM parameters with poor(er) locality, and resolve local features with a global neural field. We build on part-based implicit shape models that decompose a global deformation field into local ones. Our novel formulation models multiple implicit deformation fields with local semantic rig-like control via 3DMM-based parameters, and representative facial landmarks. Further, we propose a local control loss and attention mask mechanism that promote sparsity of each learned deformation field. Our formulation renders sharper locally controllable nonlinear deformations than previous implicit monocular approaches, especially mouth interior, asymmetric expressions, and facial details.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 202

Optical Non-Line-of-Sight Physics-based 3D Human Pose Estimation

We describe a method for 3D human pose estimation from transient images (i.e., a 3D spatio-temporal histogram of photons) acquired by an optical non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging system. Our method can perceive 3D human pose by `looking around corners' through the use of light indirectly reflected by the environment. We bring together a diverse set of technologies from NLOS imaging, human pose estimation and deep reinforcement learning to construct an end-to-end data processing pipeline that converts a raw stream of photon measurements into a full 3D human pose sequence estimate. Our contributions are the design of data representation process which includes (1) a learnable inverse point spread function (PSF) to convert raw transient images into a deep feature vector; (2) a neural humanoid control policy conditioned on the transient image feature and learned from interactions with a physics simulator; and (3) a data synthesis and augmentation strategy based on depth data that can be transferred to a real-world NLOS imaging system. Our preliminary experiments suggest that our method is able to generalize to real-world NLOS measurement to estimate physically-valid 3D human poses.Comment: CVPR 2020. Video: https://youtu.be/4HFulrdmLE8. Project page: https://marikoisogawa.github.io/project/nlos_pos

Quarterly Economic Commentary Spring 2020

COVID-19 poses the single largest challenge to the Irish economy since the financial crisis. The response of authorities both domestically and internationally to the spread of the virus, while absolutely necessary from a general health perspective, will result in millions of jobs being lost globally in the coming weeks and months and a sharp contraction in global economic activity. The limitations on international travel and the effective sealing-off of entire countries will have profound implications for cross-country trade and commerce

Quarterly Economic Commentary, Autumn 2020. ESRI Forecasting Series October 2020.

This Commentary highlights the major disparity in the impact of COVID-19 on the Irish economy. Many sectors of the domestic economy have been severely affected with widescale job losses in areas such as accommodation, food, arts and entertainment. The unemployment rate stood at 14.7 per cent in September which is much higher than the pre-pandemic level. Household spending and modified investment declined by 22 and 24 per cent respectively in the second quarter. On the other hand, exports have held up very well driven by the strong performance of medicinal and pharmaceutical products and computer services

Quarterly Economic Commentary, Winter 2020. ESRI Forecasting Series December 2020.

This Commentary highlights a significant recovery in the Irish economy in Q3 coinciding with the easing of restrictions over this period. Exports continued to perform very strongly in Q3, propped up by an ongoing strong performance in medicinal and pharmaceutical products and computer services. Consumption and Investment were also significantly improved relative to Q2 but are expected to be lower for the full year. As a result of the strong export performance in particular, our GDP forecast for 2020 has been revised up and we now expect the Irish economy to grow by 3.4 per cent this year