There is a well established socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment, despite much effort in recent decades to address this inequality. This study evaluates a university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic status (SES) students using a...

Objective: To estimate the causal effect of breastfeeding on children’s cognitive skills as measured at ages 3, 5, 7 and 11. Design: An instrumental variable (IV) strategy which provides a correction method for dealing with selection bias. Standard linear regression models are compared to...

Individuals who vote in one election are also more likely to vote in the next. Modelling the causal relationship between past and current voting decisions however is intrinsically difficult, as this positive association can exist due to habit formation or unobserved heterogeneity. This paper...

Health issues are an integral part of the political agenda in Ireland. Yet no study to date has examined the direct impact of health concerns on political outcomes. This study investigates the impact of health, both physical and psychological, and perceptions of the health service on voter...

The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

Many papers examine general level preferences for redistribution. However, few papers examine preferences for specific forms of redistribution. This paper examines the decomposition of demand for three major categories of social welfare expenditure in Ireland: unemployment payments, old age...

Objective: Prospective studies have linked both negative affective states and trait neuroticism with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. However, identifying how fluctuations in cardiovascular activity in day-to-day settings are related to changes in affect and stable...

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 analyses the determinants of voting abstention and voting intention utilising data from the Irish National Election Study (INES) and the Living in Ireland survey. We find a marked age effect (younger people less likely to vote) that is similar in magnitude across both cross-sectional...