A statistical association between more education and better health outcomes has long been observed, but in the absence of experimental data researchers have struggled to find a causal effect. Schooling reforms such as raising school leaving age, which have been enacted in many countries, can be...

Much analysis of the socioeconomic gradient of overweight/obesity has involved the calculation of concentration indices for the incidence of these conditions. However this analysis ignores the severity of the conditions, in particular whether there is a gradient to how far are people above the...

This paper examines the change in body mass index for a cohort of Irish children as they aged from 9 to 13 and decomposes the change into parts attributable to changes in observable characteristics and changes in returns to observable characteristics. The decomposition is carried out over the...

This paper reviews the extent to which policy interventions can affect risky behaviours such as smoking, drinking and diet. The justification for such intervention is typically a market failure, broadly defined. The types of market failure typically encountered are discussed. First and second...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across population may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland Covid survey, this study examines the evolution of mental health as measured in December 2020, nine months into the pandemic, compared to observations pre pandemic for two cohorts of people. A deterioration in mental health was observed for both cohorts...

Sequence and cluster analysis is applied to measures of body mass index for mothers and children for four waves of the Growing up in Ireland longitudinal data set. Optimal matching analysis is used to construct a dissimilarity matrix to which cluster analysis is then applied. Distinct...

An association between health and education has been well-established empirically. It is not clear however whether this represents a causal effect and, if so, in which direction. Recent research has attempted to unravel this by using educational reforms, such as compulsory schooling laws, as...

A recent paper by Madden used concentration indices to examine the bases of party support in Ireland in the 2011 election. This note updates this work to incorporate the 2016 election using the latest wave of ESS data. The results show that in terms of the bases of party supports many of the...

This article provides a broad overview of published research in the Economic and Social Review (ESR) in the broad areas of fiscal policy. It examines the patterns of publications and citations over time, those sub-areas which have seen the highest rate of publication and the nature of the data...