In April 2000 the Irish government introduced a national minimum wage of £4.40 an hour. This paper uses data from a specially designed panel survey of firms to estimate the labour market effects of this change. Initial results show that employment growth among firms with low wage workers prior...

This paper examines the extent to which patterns of human capital convergence can account for observed patterns of income inequality between countries. The author decomposes national income into three components: one due to education levels, one reflecting the return to education, and a residual...

In this paper we use a direct measure of individual risk-aversion to examine the relationship between risk-aversion and unemployment. Contrary to what the simple search model predicts, we observe that more risk-averse individuals are more likely to be unemployed. We present extensions of the...

This paper provides a detailed description of recent trends in inequality and poverty in Ireland. To date most of the analysis of inequality and poverty in Ireland has used cross-section data on income. We supplement the information on income with detailed data on individual expenditure taken...

The National Minimum Wage was introduced in Ireland in April 2000. This study is based on a survey carried out in late 2000/early 2001, commissioned by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, which re-interviewed firms which had been surveyed before the introduction of the minimum...

Recent papers have examined the intergenerational transmission of well-being by looking at the relationship between parents' and children's income. However, by concentrating on those who are working these studies exclude some of the very poorest in society, the unemployed. In this paper, the...

In April 2000 the Irish government introduced a national minimum wage of IR£4.40 (&U20AC;5.58) an hour. We use data from a specifically designed survey of firms to estimate the employment effects of this change. Employment growth among firms with low-wage workers prior to the legislation was no...

In this paper, the authors analyze the effect of the Restart program in the United Kingdom. This program consists of an interview of the long-term unemployed to counsel them on effective job search. Failure to attend the interview carries the threat of the cessation of unemployment benefits. The...

A common approach to dealing with missing data is to estimate the model on the common subset of data, by necessity throwing away potentially useful data. We derive a new probit type estimator for models with missing covariate data where the dependent variable is binary. For the benchmark case of...