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Madden, David (David Patrick)
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Madden, David (David Patrick)
Official Name
Madden, David (David Patrick)
Research Output
Now showing 1 - 10 of 66
- PublicationAn analysis of mental stress in Ireland, 1994-2000The General Health Questionnair(GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This paper uses stochastic dominance techniques to show that mental stress fell in Ireland over the 1994 to 2000 period regardless of the threshold chosen. Decomposition techniques suggest that changes in the proportion unemployed and in the protective effect of income, education and marital status upon mental health were the principal factors underlying this fall.
401 - PublicationMethods for studying dominance and inequality in population healthThis paper reviews methods for studying dominance and inequality in health economics. It concentrates on “pure inequality” as opposed to inequality which is related to income or some other measure of household resources. The paper reviews methods for cases when health can be measured cardinally and ordinally. There is also a brief review of statistical inference in this area.
166 - PublicationA new set of consumer demand estimates for IrelandThis paper provides a new set of consumer demand estimates for Ireland, incorporating a variety of different consumer demand models. Own-price and expenditure elasticities are presented and tests of the propositions implied by utility-maximisation are carried out, including the use of small-sample corrections. The results obtained show reasonable agreement across the different deterministic models but stochastic specification appears to be of crucial importance both for plausibility of estimates obtained and for rejection or non-rejection implied by utility-maximisation.
156 - PublicationHow does unemployment affect direct and indirect tax reform?This paper incorporates the stylised fact of labour market rationing into an analysis of marginal tax reform in Ireland. In the absence of weak separability between goods and leisure, labour market rationing will have both substitution and income effects. This paper estimates "matched pairs" of demands for Ireland and investigates the sensitivity of marginal tax reform recommendations to the presence of rationing, both with without weak separability between goods and leisure.
203 - PublicationChildhood Obesity and Maternal Education in IrelandThis paper analyses the socioeconomic gradient of chilidhood obesity in Ireland using the Growing Up in Ireland data with three innovations compared to previous work in the area. A different measure of socioeconomic status, maternal education, is employed. In addition, the depth and severity of obesity are examined as well as the incidence. Finally, the use of two waves of longitudinal data permits the analysis of the persistence of obesity. Results show that overall childhood obesity stabilised between the two waves. However the socioeconomic gradient becomes steeper in wave 2 for girls and in particular when depth, severity and persistence of obesity are accounted for. Girls whose mothers fail to complete secondary education are shown to be at a particular disadvantage.
611 - PublicationA profile of obesity in Ireland, 2002-2007Using the nationally representative Slan dataset we take a number of approaches to profile the change in obesity in Ireland over the 2002-2007 period. There is no evidence of either first or second order stochastic dominance between the two years. There is evidence that obesity and overweight are relatively more concentrated amongst males, the old and those with lower educational achievement. While obesity rose slightly over the period this was due to a rise in the average level of body mass index rather than a change in the shape of the distribution. Finally a semi-parametric decomposition of the change in the distribution over time indicates that the change in obesity arose not because of changes in population characteristics but rather the in the impact of these characteristics on body mass index.
493 - PublicationTowards a broader explanation of male-female wage differencesMost analyses of wage discrimination have followed the traditional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition of wage differences into endowment and discrimination components. This approach has neglected the possibility of wage discrimination at point of entry to the labour market and also the issue of selectivity bias. Using some recently developed techniques of Neumann and Oaxaca this paper decomposes male-female wage differences taking account of discrimination in terms of access to the labour market and also selectivity bias. It finds considerable evidence of discrimination at point of entry but that discrimination owing to selectivity bias is minimal.
634 - PublicationDistributional characteristics for Ireland : a noteThe distributional characteristic is a measure which can be used in many applications in social cost-benefit analysis. In the application here, the distributional characteristics of a number of broad aggregates of goods are calculated for Ireland. These calculations can aid in assessing the distributional implications of price and tax changes.
153 - PublicationBMI Mobility and Obesity Transitions Among Children in IrelandThis paper examines mobility and changes in Body Mass Index (BMI) for a sample of Irish children across three waves of the longitudinal Growing Up in Ireland dataset. Particular attention is paid to transitions across the key BMI thresholds of overweight and obesity. Analysis is carried out by gender and by maternal education. In general, the degree of mobility appears to be relatively limited although it is greater than for the mothers of the children over the same time period. There is relatively little variation by gender and maternal education apart from some indication of less mobility out of obesity for girls.
355 - PublicationThe relationship between low birthweight and socioeconomic status in IrelandThere is now fairly substantial evidence of a socioeconomic gradient in low birthweight for developed countries. The standard summary statistic for this gradient is the concentration index. Using data from the recently published Growing Up in Ireland survey, this paper calculates this index for low birthweight arising from preterm and intra-uterine-growth-retardation. It also carries out a decomposition of this index for the different sources of low birthweight and finds that income inequality appears to be less important for the case of preterm births, while fathers education and local environmental conditions appear to be more relevant for IUGR. The application of the standard Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition also indicates that the socioeconomic gradient for all sources of birthweight appear to arise owing to different characteristics of rich and poor, and not because the return to characteristics differ between rich and poor.
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