Learning more about the causes and consequences of migration through the experiences of Ireland’s older people. ESRI Research Bulletin 2013/2/2

The resumption of population outflows from Ireland since 2010 has regenerated an interest in the effect that migration can have on individuals. Data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) provide a unique way of studying this issue. The TILDA data contain a representative sample of people aged 50 and over and living in Ireland. The first wave of data was collected between late 2009 and early 2011. Information on over 8,000 people was collected, covering topics such as health, wellbeing and economic circumstances

The Impact of Voluntary and Involuntary Retirement on Mental Health: Evidence from Older Irish Adults

The few studies that have attempted to identify the causal effects of retirement on mental health and well-being have provided conflicting evidence. Hence, whether retirement affects mental health positively or negatively is still unclear. Our primary objective is to investigate the impact of retirement on mental health as measured by the 20-item Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). We use data from the first two waves of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). This is a nationally representative sample of individuals aged 50 and over and living in Ireland. To deal with possible endogeneity problems, we use first-differenced estimation models and control for a broad range of life events occurring between the two waves. These include transition to retirement but also demographic, social, economic and physical health events. As part of the TILDA survey, reasons for retirement are asked. We exploit this information and distinguish between individuals who retired voluntarily, involuntarily or because of own ill health. We find that involuntary, or forced, retirement has a negative and statistically significant effect on mental health. In contrast, we find no effects for voluntary retirement. We also find that retirement due to ill health is negatively associated with mental health

The psychic costs of migration: evidence from Irish return migrants

Within the economics literature, the 'psychic costs' of migration have been incorporated into theoretical models since Sjaastad (J Polit Econ 70:80 93, 1962). However, the existence of such costs has rarely been investigated in empirical papers. In this paper, we look at the psychic costs of migration by using alcohol problems as an indicator. Rather than comparing immigrants and natives, we look at the native-born in a single country and compare those who have lived away for a period of their lives and those who have not. We use data from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing which is a large, nationally representative sample of older Irish adults. We find that men who lived away are more likely to have suffered from alcohol problems than men who stayed. For women, we again see a higher incidence of alcohol problems for short-term migrants. However, long-term female migrants are less likely to have suffered from alcohol problems. For these women, it seems that migration provided psychic benefits, and this is consistent with findings fro

Increasing the State Pension Age, the Recession and Expected Retirement Ages

In March 2010, the Irish government announced that the age at which the state pension is paid would be raised to 66 in 2014, 67 in 2021 and 68 in 2028. One typical objective of such policy reforms is to provide an incentive for later retirement. The question we address in this paper is whether the expected retirement ages of Irish individuals aged 50 to 64 changed as a result of the policy announcement. The data we use are from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Our findings show that there was no noticeable break in expected retirement ages before and after 3 March, 2010 (the day on which the policy announcement was made). Also during 2010, the economic news became increasingly bad as the full scale of the fiscal and banking crises in Ireland emerged. The data suggest that there was a reduction in the proportion of people planning to retire at age 65 after 30 September, 2010, the day that the full scale of the banking crisis emerged

Coaching To Win: A Systematic Approach To Achieving Productivity Through Coaching

The strategic business plan for any organization is very specific regarding sales force objectives and activities.  Therefore, those responsible for the human capital of the sales function  must be prepared to work directly with their sales employees, in an effort to meet management agreed upon goals, to gain market share, and to continuously improve overall performance.  Over the years, the task of managing sales employees has been varied and undefined.  Managing has been referred to as “the art of getting things done through people.”  For decades, experts have included planning, organizing, staffing, influencing or commanding, and controlling as the systematic way of making things happen.  Recently, this commanding function has been dropped in preference to leading.  It has been proven that coaching is more effective than the old approach of using fear and intimidation to achieve sales management objectives.  This paper focuses on the need for these sales supervisors/managers to change their previously used tactics and embrace a new, proactive approach of “Coaching” their sales employees.  This new approach is described in detail below and will help unlock the mysteries of becoming a viable and proactive sales supervisor.  It will also give supervisors the tools needed to meet the needs of management and create a more productive, independent sales force. “Coaching” is becoming the leading preference for supervisors and managers, because it is proving to be more effective than previous used conventional methods.  Coaching is the art of continually assessing and developing sales people, so they can be empowered to do their jobs well!  Often, the conventional methods included command functioning tactics of fear and intimidation to motivate sales personnel.  By using the “Coaching” approach, supervisors and managers have more control of their sales staff and of achieving their management goals.  By developing a coaching relationship, which includes encouragement, listening, counseling, providing positive feedback, being supportive, resourcefulness, thinking with the future in mind, and modeling, these supervisors can give rise to a foundation where sales employees will be energized, aligned, and collectively mobilized to achieve and sustain customer satisfaction and trust.  In so doing, sales employees will also be empowered to meet management’s strategic goals

A hybrid model for forecasting short-term electricity demand

Currently the UK Electric market is guided by load (demand) forecasts published every thirty minutes by the regulator. A key factor in predicting demand is weather conditions, with forecasts published every hour. We present HYENA: a hybrid predictive model that combines feature engineering (selection of the candidate predictor features), mobile-window predictors and finally LSTM encoder-decoders to achieve higher accuracy with respect to mainstream models from the literature. HYENA decreased MAPE loss by 16% and RMSE loss by 10% over the best available benchmark model, thus establishing a new state of the art for the UK electric load (and price) forecasting

Hardening against adversarial examples with the smooth gradient method

Commonly used methods in deep learning do not utilise transformations of the residual gradient available at the inputs to update the representation in the dataset. It has been shown that this residual gradient, which can be interpreted as the first-order gradient of the input sensitivity at a particular point, may be used to improve generalisation in feed-forward neural networks, including fully connected and convolutional layers. We explore how these input gradients are related to input perturbations used to generate adversarial examples and how the networks that are trained with this technique are more robust to attacks generated with the fast gradient sign method