This paper presents a simple statistical exercise to provide a benchmark for the degree of electoral stagnation without direct officeholder benefits or challenger scare-off effects. Here electoral stagnation arises solely due to incumbent-quality advantage where the higher quality candidate wins...

Ireland provides an interesting setting for the study of incumbency advantage. Its electoral system creates incentives for political candidates to cultivate a loyal, personal following and the rate of incumbent re-election is one of the highest in the world. This paper exploits the...

This paper presents a simple statistical exercise to provide a benchmark for the degree of electoral stagnation without direct officeholder benefits or challenger scare-off effects. Here electoral stagnation arises solely due to incumbent-quality advantage where the higher quality candidate wins...

This paper uses proxies for university quality derived from the Research Assessment Exercise and the Teaching Quality Assurance Agency to assess the impact of university quality on the labour market outcomes of a cohort of UK graduates. The impacts on job quality and earnings were mainly limited...

This article utilizes data from three separate skill related surveys of firms in the Northern Ireland IT, Electronic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering industries in order to assess the extent to which the performance of high-tech firms are being constrained as a result of hard-to-fill...

This paper examines the extent to which marketing assistance administered to a group of high performing Northern Ireland SMEs led to improved export revenue growth. Standard OLS models provided no evidence to support the view that marketing grants substantially improved the export performance of...

This paper uses data from the 2003 and 2006 National Employment Surveys to analyse the public-private sector wage gap in Ireland. In particular, we investigate the impact of awards implemented under a number of wage setting institutions on the pay differential. These include the pay increases...

The impact that the Great Recession has had on countries’ labour markets has been well documented. In Ireland, the contraction in economic activity that took place resulted in the country's overall unemployment rate increasing from 4.6% in 2006 to 15% in 2012. The country's youth unemployment...

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to test the degree to which measures of job insecurity are correlated with changes in labour market status. Three major findings are reported. First, the perceived probability of job loss is only weakly related to both exogenous job separations and...