Ronan is Director of Trinity Research in Social Sciences, a hub of over 300 research active social scientists in Trinity, and also Associate Director and Data Lead at the Centre for Economics, Politics and History, a joint research hub between Trinity and Queen’s University Belfast, funded by the North-South Research Programme of the Government of Ireland.
He is an internationally recognised expert on housing markets and housing price indices. Since 2004, he has authored the Daft.ie Reports, the longest-running report on sale and rental prices in Ireland. Since 2017, he has worked on behalf of the IMF training policymakers in South America, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia on how to measure housing price trends. Ronan has also worked with numerous individual countries — including Bolivia, Iraq, Jordan, Mongolia, Nepal, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam — building local expert capacity.
Ronan is an active contributor to policy debates, especially on the topic of housing. His research and commentary features regularly in the media, both nationally and internationally. He is a columnist at TheCurrency, having previously written for the Sunday Business Post and the Sunday Independent. Internationally he is regularly interviewed on the Irish economy — past examples include the BBC, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, YLE (Finland), the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, Sky News, the New York Times and The Economist.
Ronan has written a number of book chapters, including for the Economy of Ireland textbook, and in 2011, he was editor, with Ed Burke, of Next Generation Ireland. Together with co-authors, Rowena Gray and Jason Barr, he is writing Rent & The City, a history of the (un)affordability of housing in New York over the last centuries. Commissioned by Columbia University Press, it is due out in late 2025.
From 2021 to 2024, Ronan was a member of The Housing Commission and for the period 2017-2022 was a Board Member of the Higher Education Authority. He has been a Council Member of the Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (SSISI) since 2017 and was Honorary Secretary for 2018-2021. From 2016 to 2022, he was on the Organising Committee of the Dublin Economic Workshops.