This paper provides a detailed description of recent trends in inequality and poverty in Ireland. To date most of the analysis of inequality and poverty in Ireland has used cross-section data on income. We supplement the information on income with detailed data on individual expenditure taken...

Reliable measures of obesity are essential in order to develop effective policies to tackle the costs of obesity. We examine what, if anything, we can learn about obesity rates using self-reported BMI once we allow for possible measurement error. Existing approaches that correct for...

This paper uses data on 9 year old Irish children to examine the determinants of mathematical achievement among young children. We find that boys perform better in maths than girls and that this gender gap is driven by differences at the top of the achievement distribution. While there is no...

This paper uses data on both self-reported and true measures of individual Body Mass Index (BMI) to examine the nature of measurement error in self-reported BMI and to look at the consequences of using self-reported measures when estimating the effect of BMI on economic outcomes. In keeping with...

There is considerable debate about the role of wage rigidity in explaining unemployment. Despite a large body of empirical work, no consensus has emerged on the extent of wage rigidity. Previous attempts to empirically examine wage rigidity have been hampered by small samples and measurement...

the persistence of poverty remains a major concern of policy makers. Despite this concern there has been little empirical work examining the issue. In this paper we provide estimates of poverty persistence in the U.K. by examining the degree of intergenerational mobility. Our findings support...

When economists talk about equality, they typically have equality of outcomes, like welfare or income in mind. However such a view of equality is not entirely satisfactory and theories of equality of opportunity have been developed and proposed as an alternative. While there has been some...

Over the last 10-15 years female labour force participation rates have increased substantially in Ireland. At the same time there has been a large increase in wage inequality but a decline in total household income inequality. In this paper we examine the relationship between the trends in...

This note describes and illustrates a new Stata program, gmmcovearn, that estimates the covariance structure of earnings for a variety of models using the GMM estimator. The program estimates models that incorporate time factor loadings and cohort factor loadings on both the transitory and...

In this paper we study the performance of the GMM estimator in the context of the covariance structure of earnings. Using analytical and Monte Carlo techniques we examine the sensitivity of parameter identification to key features such as panel length, sample size, the degree of persistence of...