Preferences for Specific Social Welfare Expenditure in Ireland

Many papers examine general level preferences for redistribution. However, few papers examine preferences for specific forms of redistribution. This paper examines the decomposition of demand for three major categories of social welfare expenditure in Ireland: unemployment payments, old age pensions and child benefit. The determinants of preferences are found to be fairly consistent with a self-interested economics perspective with respect to the utilisation and financing of these three specific schemes. In addition, the split sampling procedure used in the nationwide survey indicated that the provision of information on the schemes’ costs did not have a significant effect on preferences.

Social Capital & Self-Rated Health in the Republic of Ireland. Evidence from the European Social Survey

This paper analyses the determinants of self-reported health in Ireland, conditioning selfreported health on a set of socio-economic, labour market and social capital variables. Ireland has the highest self-reported health rate in Europe. The results demonstrate statistically significant effects of income on self-reported health that are robust to different statistical specifications and statistically significant though modest effects of social capital variables such as associational membership and frequency of social meeting.

Behavioural Economics and Drinking Behaviour: Preliminary Results from an Irish College Study

This paper examines the results of single-equation regression models of the determinants of alcohol consumption patterns among college students modelling a rich variety of covariates including gender, family and peer drinking, tenure, personality, risk perception, time preferences and age of drinking onset. The results demonstrate very weak income effects and very strong effects of personality, peer drinking (in particular closest friend), time preferences and other substance use. The task of future research is to verify these results and assess causality using more detailed methods.

Micro-Level Determinants of Lecture Attendance and Additional Study-Hours

This paper uses novel measures of individual differences that produce new insights about student inputs into the (higher) education production function. The inputs examined are lecture attendance and additional study-hours. The data were collected through a web-survey that the authors designed. The analysis includes the following measures: willingness to take risks, consideration of future consequences and non-cognitive ability traits. Besides age, gender and year of study, the main determinants of lecture attendance and additional study-hours are attitude to risk, future-orientation and conscientiousness. In addition, future-orientation, and in particular conscientiousness, determine lecture attendance to a greater extent than they determine additional study. Finally, we show that family income and financial transfers (from both parents and the state) do not determine any educational input. This study suggests that non-cognitive abilities may be more important than financial constraints in the determination of inputs related to educational production functions.higher education, education inputs, lecture attendance, hours of study, future-orientation, attitude to risk, non-cognitive ability, conscientiousness

Psychological and Biological Foundations of Time Preference: Evidence from a Day Reconstruction Study with Biological Tracking

This paper considers the relationship between the economic concept of time preference and relevant concepts from psychology and biology. Using novel data from a time diary study conducted in Ireland that combined detailed psychometric testing with medical testing and realtime bio-tracking, we examine the distribution of a number of psychometric measures linked to the economic concept of time preferences and test the extent to which these measures form coherent clusters and the degree to which these clusters are related to underlying biological substrates. The paper finds that financial discounting is related to a range of psychological variables including consideration of future consequences, self-control, conscientiousness, extraversion, and experiential avoidance as well as being predicted by heart rate variability and blood pressure.

Reference Dependent Financial Satisfaction over the Course of the Celtic Tiger: A Panel Analysis Utilising the Living in Ireland Survey 1994-2001

The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 4,000 individuals tracked through the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom period, 1994-2001. The impact of the level of individual and household income, the time-path of income and the impact of reference group income on financial satisfaction are all considered. To the extent that income influences financial satisfaction, there is strong evidence from this paper that household income has a greater effect on financial satisfaction than individual income. There is also evidence that changes in income have an independent effect on financial satisfaction with the time derivative of income entering positively in the financial satisfaction equation. Thus, our paper gives further evidence to support the hypothesis that individuals process changes as well as absolute levels of income. While reference group income has a negative effect at the start of the period it has no effect at the end.