The intent of the patent system is to encourage innovation by granting the innovator exclusive rights to a discovery for a limited period of time: with monopoly power, the innovator can recover the costs of creating the innovation which otherwise might not have existed. And, over time, the...

Research on time preference formation and socioeconomic differences in discounting has received little attention to date. This article examines the extent to which early childhood differences emerge in measures of hyperactivity, impulsivity and persistence, all of which are good psychometric...

The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 4,000 individuals tracked through the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom period, 1994-2001. The impact of the level of individual and household income, the...

This paper models the probability of 15-year-old children missing school or being late. The paper sets out to uncover the effects of family background and birth order on attendance. Looking at birth order effects allows one to test Sulloway’s “Born to Rebel” hypothesis that older siblings...

In a recent paper, Kanazawa and Kovar (2004) assert that given certain empirical regularities about assortative mating and the heritability of intelligence and beauty, that it logically follows that more intelligent people are more beautiful. It is argued here that this “theorem” is false...

We document the nature of structural changes in employment to understand “jobless” growth in Irish Manufacturing in the aftermath of EEC/EU membership, 1972-2003. By 1972, forty years of protectionism and fifteen years of export promotion induced the coexistence of large exporting plants...

We apply a new estimator to the measurement of the economic returns to education. We control for endogenous education, unobserved ability and measurement error using only the natural heteroscedasticty of wages and education attainment. Our prefered estimate, 6.07%, is closer to the OLS estimate...

Objectives: There is a substantial knowledge gap about the distribution of mental heath in community populations. The European Social Survey is particularly useful as it contains information on over 40,000 individuals, including 2,286 Irish adults. The objective of this study is to conduct a...

This note re-examines a finding by Crow et al. (1998) that equal skill of right and left hands is associated with deficits in cognitive ability. This is consistent with the idea that failure to develop dominance of one hemisphere is associated with various pathologies such as learning...

The Irish health care system offers a tax financed, universal entitlement to public care at a nominal user fee, nonetheless 50% of the Irish population purchase private health insurance. This paper empirically models the propensity to insure as a function of individual and household...