The Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 is puzzling, since despite the high death rates, there is no discernable diminution in height amongst the majority of cohorts who were exposed to the famine in crucial growth years. An explanation is that shorter children experienced greater mortality and...

Background: Nutrition in utero and infancy may causally affect health and mortality at old ages. Until now, very few studies have demonstrated long-run effects on survival of early life nutrition, mainly because of data limitations and confounding issues. Methods: This paper investigates whether...

The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

The paper considers child poverty in rich English-speaking countries – the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland. Do all these countries really stand out from other OECD countries for their levels of child poverty, as is sometimes assumed? And what policies have they adopted...

Using a rich and comparable micro-data set, we analyse international differences in gender pay gaps in the private sector for a sample of five European economies: Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Using different methods, we examine how wage structure, differences in the distribution...

This paper applies the familiar theoretical distinction between general and specific training to the empirical task of estimating the returns to in-company training. Using a firm-level dataset which distinguishes between general and specific training, we test for the relative effects of the two...

The purpose of this paper is to review what has been learnt about Irish migration from the work of social scientists, largely economists. For most of its modern history, Ireland has experienced large net outflows. I discuss how the outflow was made up of lower skilled people up until the 1980s...

We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during a period ranging between 1980 and 1995. We focus on within-educational-levels wage inequality by estimating quantile regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the...

Increasing earnings inequality has been an important feature of the US and UK labour markets in recent years. The increase appears to be related to an increased demand for skilled labour and an increase in the returns to education. In this paper we examine what has happened to earnings...

In this paper we analyse the impact of governmental grant provision on plant performance. To this end we utilise rich information derived from three data sources for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, where grant provision has been an important part of the industrial policy. We use a matching...