Ireland is one of the countries most severely affected by the Great Recession. National income fell by more than 10 per cent between 2007 and 2012, as a result of the bursting of a remarkable property bubble, an exceptionally severe banking crisis, and deep fiscal adjustment. This paper examines...

The Programme for Government indicated that under a Universal Health Insurance system, the State would "pay insurance premia for people on low incomes and subsidise premia for people on middle incomes". This paper examines issues in the design of such a subsidy scheme, in the context of overall...

The Irish healthcare system includes a complex mix of entitlements - some are universal, others age-related, and some are income-related. In this report, we concentrate on the major income-related entitlements in the current system i.e., the Medical Card and the GP Visit Card. Most medical cards...

Over the past 30 years, there have been periods of boom and bust, but average household incomes have grown strongly in Ireland. The distribution of household income has been broadly stable over this period, so that there has been substantial growth for low-, middle- and high-income households....

This paper examines how changes to the social welfare system for lone parents, such as the tightening of eligibility criteria for One-Parent Family Payment and the introduction of Jobseeker's Transitional Payment, affected lone-parent incomes and work incentives. Our main contributions are...

Since 2013, researchers in the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) have compiled a hedonic rental index for the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB). The indicator estimates a standardised rental index on a national, Dublin and outside of Dublin basis based on the 950,000 rental...