An increasing amount of research now relates to full-time higher education students who work part-time during their study. However, little is known about this issue in the Irish context, despite the fact that the latter provides an interesting case-study due to its unprecedented economic growth...

Research has shown that older individuals are far more likely to avail of health care and there is concern in a number of countries that the trend toward population ageing may mean that health care expenditures increase to unsustainable levels. However, there is a growing body of evidence that...

This paper explores the way in which truancy levels are structured by individual social class and the social mix of the school within the Republic of Ireland. Drawing on a national survey of young people, truancy levels are found to be higher among working-class and Traveller students. Truancy...

This paper has three objectives. First, a review of the developing body of work on the economics of immigration in Ireland is provided. Second, the analysis undertaken by Barrett and McCarthy (forthcoming) of earnings of immigrants in Ireland is updated. Third, the earnings of immigrant women...

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, we suggest a decomposition methodology based on counterfactual simulations. First, it provides an absolute measure of the impact of tax-benefit changes on inequality, which combines changes in policy structure...

Background: A change in the pricing of general practitioner care in the Republic of Ireland in 2001 provides a natural experiment of the influence of economic incentives on GP visiting. Methods: Social surveys (N=937 in 2000 & N=1053 in 2004) were carried out before and after the change in...

The public/private mix in Irish health care is nowhere more evident than in the acute hospital system where both public and private patients can be treated in public hospitals by the same consultant. By undertaking new analyses of data from the Hospital In-Patient Enquiry Scheme, this study...

A feature of the Irish economy in recent years has been the high net flow of people into the country. The analysis compares owner-occupancy by natives and immigrants in 1995 and 2004. The results show that immigrants have higher headship rates than the native population but have a much lower...

This paper examines whether macroeconomic convergence is an automatic outcome of forming a currency union by combining an analysis of real interest parity (RIP) in the EU with the argument for the endogeneity of the Optimum Currency Area (OCA) criteria. Using the DF-GLS and the CIPS* panel unit...