Now showing 1 - 10 of 70
  • Publication
    The effects of human capital on social capital : a cross-country analysis (version 1.6)
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2003-07)
    This paper uses two sets of cross-country micro datasets to analyse individuals’ participation in voluntary and community activities and organisations. Analysing countries in the International Adult Literacy Survey and focusing on the impact of human capital I find a consistently positive effect of years of education on participation with the marginal effect of an additional year being around 2 or 3% for most countries. The effects are somewhat higher in English speaking countries. However controlling for functional literacy reduces this significantly with literacy accounting for around half the marginal effect of education. Labour market effects are generally very weak Using instrumental variables for a subset of countries we test and are unable to reject the hypothesis that education is exogenous. Using Eurobarometer data yields higher estimated impacts of schooling for most countries. It is also shown how attitudes towards the “third sector” predict higher participation in some forms of volunteering while a measure of religiosity often predicts more altruistic volunteering.
      153
  • Publication
    Big and tall parents do not have more sons
    (University College Dublin; Centre for Economic Research, 2007-11)
    In a 2005 paper Kanezawa proposed a generalisation of the classic Trivers-Willard hypothesis. It was argued that as a result taller and heavier parents should have more sons relative to daughters. Using two British cohort studies, evidence was presented which was partly consistent with the hypothesis. I analyse the relationship between an individual being male and their parents’ height and weight using one of the datasets. No evidence of any such relationship is found.
      407
  • Publication
    The implications of a switch to locally varying business rates
    (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Institute for Fiscal Studies, 1992-02) ;
    It has been nearly 2 years since the UK government reformed the system of local business rates to introduce a uniform business rate (UBR), but the debate continues over the merits of the new system. The change across regions in the revenues raised by the uniform system of business rates introduced in 1990 was due to 2 distinct components: a UBR effect and a reassessment of rateable values effect. Four alternative models of locally varying business rates were analyzed. These models are distinguished by alternative assumptions about resource equalization. A return to a system similar to the pre-1990 varying rates system would unfairly burden businesses in areas of low population. An improved model would take into account the degree of business concentration within a local authority. Using a model that relates local business tax rates to expenditure per establishment rather than per capita appears to be a more appropriate way of achieving horizontal equity.
    Scopus© Citations 3  1952
  • Publication
    Self-reported health in good times and in bad: Ireland in the 21st century
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2016-08) ;
    The Great Recession has renewed interest in whether and how health responds to macroeconomic changes. Ireland provides a convenient natural experiment to examine this since a period of sustained high growth and low unemployment – the so-called Celtic Tiger period- gave way to a deep recession following the economic crisis in 2008. We use data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (SILC), to explore what happened to self-reported health over the period 2002-2014. While some sub-populations experienced pro-cyclical effects on self-rated health, in general we find no evidence that the proportion of the population in poor health was higher after the onset of the economic crisis. However a multivariate model implies that there was some effect at the top of the health distribution with a higher unemployment rate switching individuals from being in “very good health” to “good health”. Effect sizes are much larger for females than males.
      244
  • Publication
    Political interest, cognitive ability and personality : determinants of voter turnout in Britain (version 1.5)
    (University College Dublin; School of Economics, 2005-06) ;
    This paper uses longitudinal data from the National Cohort Development Study (NCDS) to investigate the determinants of voter turnout in the 1997 British General Election. It introduces measures of cognitive ability and personality into models of electoral participation and finds that firstly, their inclusion reduces the impact of education and secondly, that standard turnout models may be biased by the inclusion of the much used “interest in politics” measure. A bivariate probit model of turnout and interest then shows that individuals with high ability, an aggressive personality and a sense of civic duty are more likely to both turn out to vote and to have an interest in politics.
      1060
  • Publication
      274
  • Publication
    Productivity and trade unions in British manufacturing industry 1973-85
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 1993-05)
    This paper uses panel data on British manufacturing industries between 1973 and 1985 to examine the relationship between productivity and labour organisation. It is shown that the precise relationship between unions and productivity levels is difficult to pin down. There is some evidence of a negative relationship further as does controlling for endogeneity. We also find some evidence that industrial concentration is associated with higher levels of measured productivity.
      418
  • Publication
    Upper Bounds on Risk Aversion under Mean-variance Utility
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2019-02)
    Based on a simple prior, this note derives upper bounds for the coefficient of absolute & relative risk aversion if utility can be written as depending linearly on the mean and variance of income.
      436
  • Publication
    An econometric analysis of burglary in Ireland
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2004-05) ; ;
    This paper outlines an econometric model of the level of burglary in Ireland between 1952 and 1998. We explain the evolution of the trend in Burglary in terms of demographic factors: in this case the share of young males in the population, the macro-economy in the form of consumer expenditure and two characteristics of the criminal justice system : the detection rate for these crimes and the size of the prison population. The share of young males is associated with higher levels of these crimes. Imprisonment and detection act as powerful forces for reducing crimes, the effects of aggregate consumption are more difficult to pin down but we show that higher spending is associated with more lucrative but probably fewer crimes. One somewhat surprising result is that we were unable to find any robust effect from direct measures of labour market activity such as unemployment rates or wage levels.
      505
  • Publication
    The distribution of discrimination in immigrant earnings : evidence from Britain 1974-1993
    (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 1997-08-21) ; ;
    This paper uses the General Household Survey data for the UK to study earnings discrimination between natives and migrants. The key result is that the main source of discrimination is ethnicity rather than migrant status per se. This paper differs from the conventional focus in studies of earnings discrimination, which focus on mean wage differences. In contrast we study the entire distribution of the wage gap, and incorporate distributionally sensitive measures of the wage gap reflecting different levels of aversion to discrimination. Our results are consistent with previous studies for the UK that find that non-white immigrants are the most widely discriminated in terms of their labour market returns. Moreover this discrimination on the basis of colour is also present in the sub-sample of natives.
      667