During the Irish fiscal crisis of the 1980s, he was Economic Advisor to Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, working on issues as diverse as income tax and social welfare, restructuring of failing state-owned enterprises, legislative reform for building societies, the governance of national statistics provision, and the devaluation of the Irish pound in August 1986.
At the World Bank he published research on financial sector issues, drawing on policy advice and analysis in a wide range of emerging and developing economies from China and Viet Nam to Egypt, Iran and Tanzania, among others, as well as in the CFA franc, Rand and Eastern Caribbean currency unions.
In 2007, he was appointed Professor of International Financial Economics and Development at Trinity College, Dublin.
In this position he acquired a reputation as a "straight talker" who would not follow the "green jersey agenda" (a major criticism of the Central Bank of Ireland pre-crisis, see criticisms of the Irish Central Bank).
[4] During the famous leprechaun economics affair, he made the following comment: The statistical distortions created by the impact on the Irish National Accounts of the global assets and activities of a handful of large multinational corporations have now become so large as to make a mockery of conventional uses of Irish GDP.He has said the following about credit booms: The tax revenue generated by the boom came in many forms: capital gains on property, stamp duty on property transactions, value added tax on construction materials and income tax from the extra workers – immigrants from the rest of Europe, from Africa, from China, flooded in as the construction sector alone swelled up to account for about 13 per cent of the numbers at work ...[6]