This paper is concerned with the relationship between class size and the student outcome – length of time in post-compulsory schooling. Research on this topic has been problematic partly because omitted unobservables, like parents’ incomes and education levels, are likely to be correlated...

This paper examines students’ perceptions of excessive drinking using statistical vignettes based on standard alcohol misuse markers used in the WHO Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). Quantitative analyses revealed stark heterogeneity in students’ perceptions of alcohol...

The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus with the re-emergence of debt as a major problem consequent upon the global financial crisis. This leads us to re-evaluate the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. We...

This paper reports the preliminary work under way to analyse the composition of public spending in response to increased economic openness in the advanced industrial societies over recent decades. The compensation hypothesis predicts that public spending will rise in response to greater...

This paper reports estimates of the UK “college premium” for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006 - a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand...

The aim of this report is to explore the historical development of third level access programmes in Ireland, that is, programmes aimed at improving access to third level education by the socio-economically disadvantaged. One key objective is to locate the UCD higher education access programme...

The purpose of this essay is to explore the relationship between revolution and violence in Marxism and in a series of texts drawing on Marxian theory. Part 1 outlines the basic normative frameworks which determine the outer limits of permissible violence in Marxism. Part 2 presents a critical...

This paper provides estimates of the private financial return to education based on large samples of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins which we obtain from Danish population registers. Our estimation exploits the fact that our data is a long panel. We show that the rising inequality,...

Health issues are an integral part of the political agenda in Ireland. Yet no study to date has examined the direct impact of health concerns on political outcomes. This study investigates the impact of health, both physical and psychological, and perceptions of the health service on voter...