Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of...

This paper analyses how international outsourcing affects plant productivity, with the major contribution lying in the identification of heterogeneous effects for firms with differing internationalisation status. The results point to a striking pattern: the status of being an outsourcer matters...

The impact of international trade on firm productivity is tested by accounting for firms' import as well as export status for a large panel of Irish manufacturing firms. Two-way traders and exporters-only are found to be the most productive firms, with a significant gap between them and...

An increasing number of international agreements require “nondiscrimination” from their participants, i.e. the government of one country cannot treat foreign firms differently from domestic firms. This is at odds with a government’s desire to benefit its own citizens rather than foreign...

Since firm heterogeneity has been introduced into international trade models, the importance of firm entry and exit (the extensive margin) has been highlighted. Thomas Chaney (2008) illustrates how accounting for heterogenous firms (and this extensive margin) alters the standard gravity...

University tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in Ireland in 1996. This paper examines the effect of this reform on the socioeconomic gradient (SES) to determine whether the reform was successful in achieving its objective of promoting educational equality. It finds that the reform...

The majority of research to date investigating strategic tariffs in the presence of multinationals finds a knife-edge result where, in equilibrium, all foreign firms are either multinationals or exporters. Utilizing a model of heterogeneous firms, we find equilibria in which both pure exporters...

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. However, these models tend to rely heavily on symmetry assumptions and assume melting iceberg transport costs as the only form of trade restrictions. Moreover, a standard...

We study the effects of the large expansion in British educational attainment that took place for cohorts born between 1970 and 1975. Using the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, we find that the expansion caused men to increase education by about a year on average and gain about 8% higher wages;...

The paper places Ireland's current economic crisis in historical perspective. It compares it with four others since independence: those of 1934-38, 1939-45, the 1950s, and the 1980s. The present crisis is arguably the gravest of the five.