This paper looks at the statistical matching technique used to match the Irish Census of Agriculture to the Irish National Farm Survey (NFS) to produce a farm level static spatial microsimulation model of Irish agriculture. The match produces a spatially disaggregated population microdata set of...

Tax systems are expected to achieve many things at once and this paper discusses the trade-offs involved in attempting to reconcile conflicting aims. It surveys the various instruments that are used to take account of marriage and the presence of children and describes the current systems in the...

This paper analyses the dynamic structure of individual earnings across 14 EU countries over the period 1994-2001 using ECHP. Understanding wage mobility and its link with the evolution of cross-sectional earnings inequality is important from a welfare perspective, particularly given the large...

Cohabitation has grown strongly in Ireland over the last decade. We use large-scale surveys to characterise its extent and nature. We find it has almost tripled in incidence between 1994 and 2002. It is associated with being young, urban and in the labour market. Most cohabitations are short,...

EU enlargement is hardly can be seen as the major push factor for migration. There are mainly economic factors that influence the migration decisions. Besides it seems that there is a migration potential, unique for every country, that pre-determines the migration or labor mobility. In our paper...

This paper charts the main changes in structure of the Irish system of tax and social benefits over the period 1955-2002. It analyses the evolution of the redistributive forces in the system over the period and considers the effect of the incremental reform on the complexity of policy and...

Although demographic ageing will affect Ireland later than many EU countries, by 2050 it will result in significant pressures on the public pension system. Recent reform in Ireland has attempted to address these pressures by increasing the incentive to save for retirement and by introducing...

This paper examines explanations for the large decline in fertility that occurred in Ireland between 1970 and the mid 1990?s. We find that the increased opportunity cost of having a child together with the postponement of birth and marriage are important drivers in the fall. Declining male...

This paper examines the distribution of lifetime income in Ireland. To do this a new prototype dynamic microsimulation model for Ireland is used to generate lifetime income streams. Aggregating over the lifetime we can assess the distribution of lifetime income and the degree of redistribution...

As in many other developed countries, Ireland in recent decades has experienced a postponement of maternity. In this paper we consider the main trends in this phenomenon, considering changes in first and later births separately. We adapt the theoretical model due to Walker (1995) to incorporate...