This paper evaluates the impact of a reduction in the child qualifying age criteria for the One Parent Family Payment (OFP) in Ireland. From 2012 to 2015, the child qualifying age for OFP was reduced from 18 years to 7 years. Lone parents who no longer qualified for the payment, based on the age...

We use distributional regression analysis to study the impact of a six percent increase in the Irish minimum wage on the distribution of hourly wages and household income. Wage inequality, measured by the ratio of wages in the 90th and 10th percentiles and the 75th and 25th percentiles,...

We use a unique question from the Irish Labour Force Survey that captures the reasons for workers being paid below the minimum wage. Compared to existing work, this allows us to more precisely identify sub-minimum wage workers. We find that 5.6 percent of minimum wage workers are paid below the...

The term skill mismatch is very broad and can relate to many forms of labour market friction, including vertical mismatch, skill gaps, skill shortages, field of study (horizontal) mismatch and skill obsolescence. In this paper we provide a clear overview of each concept and discuss the...

In general, women report greater job satisfaction than men. The existing literature cannot fully explain the nature of this difference, as the gap tends to persist even when controlling for job characteristics. In this paper, we study job satisfaction using recent data for 28 EU countries....

On the 1st of January 2016 the Irish National Minimum Wage increased from €8.65 to €9.15 per hour, an increase of approximately six percent. We use a difference-in-differences estimator to evaluate whether the change in the minimum wage affected the hours worked and likelihood of job loss of...

We use data from a new international dataset - the European Skills and Jobs Survey - to create a unique measure of skills-displacing technological change (SDT), defined as technological change that may render workers' skills obsolete. We find that 16 percent of adult workers in the EU are...

A minimum wage increase could lead to adverse employment effects for certain sub-groups of minimum wage workers, while leaving others unaffected. This heterogeneity could be overlooked in studies that examine the overall population of minimum wage workers. In this paper, we test for...

In the mid 2000s Ireland experienced a large inflow of immigrants, partly in response to strong economic growth but also in response to its decision to allow full access to its labour market when EU expansion occurred in May 2004. Between 2004 and 2007, the proportion of non-nationals living in...

We estimate the impact of immigration on the wages of natives in Ireland applying the technique proposed by Borjas (2003). Under this method, the labour market is divided into a number of skill cells, where the cells are defined by groups with similar levels of experience and education (or...