The issue of welfare receipt by immigrants is highly controversial across Europe. In this paper, we assess whether immigrants are more likely to receive welfare payments relative to natives across a range of European countries. Using the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions for...

Ireland offers a valuable case study of the evolution of wage inequality in a period of exceptional growth in output, employment and incomes from 1994 to 2007. We find that dispersion in hourly wages across all employees fell sharply to 2000, before increasing though much less sharply to 2007....

Report prepared for the European Commission, Bonn 2012 (216 pages)

Both overall income inequality and inequality in the distribution of earnings rose sharply during the 1980s and 1990s in a number of industrialised countries, notably the UK and the USA. This makes it particularly important to know how the distribution of income in Ireland has been changing over...

As part of its 2020 Strategy adopted, the EU has set a number of headline targets including one for poverty and social exclusion reduction. Our analysis in this paper suggests that, in focusing on the union of the three chosen component indicators, cross-nationally we are not comparing like with...

In this paper we take advantage of the recent availability of data from the special module on material deprivation in the 2009 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between material deprivation and...

Introduction Ireland, a small country of only 4 million people, none the less represents a particularly interesting case study on the distributional impact of pronounced macroeconomic fluctuations. In the first instance this is because Ireland has seen quite remarkable macroeconomic fluctuations...

As awareness of the limitations of relying solely on income to measure poverty and social exclusion has become more widespread, attention has been increasingly focused on multi-dimensional approaches. To date efforts to measure multidimensional poverty and social exclusion in rich countries have...

In this paper, taking advantage of the inclusion of a special module on material deprivation in EU-SILC 2009, we provide a comparative analysis of patterns of deprivation. Our analysis identifies six relatively distinct dimensions of deprivation with generally satisfactory overall levels of...