Wage scarring among unlucky European cohorts. ESRI Working Paper 668 June 2020.

This paper examines how starting one’s career in a weak labour market affects future labour market outcomes using data from 13 European countries. Income losses, so called scarring effects, are found to be solely levied on college graduates. For every percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate at graduation, college graduates incur wage penalties of 2% one year later. These penalties are over 1% for the next eight years but are zero by year ten. During the Great Recession, college graduates in countries who experienced harsh sovereign debt crises were particularly affected. In Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain new graduates with a college education faced wage losses of between 12 and 23% in each of the first ten years of their career

Child poverty in Ireland and the pandemic recession. ESRI Budget Perspectives 202104 July 2020.

New research by the ESRI highlights trends in child poverty during the Great Recession of 2008 and simulates the effect of recent COVID-19-related job losses alongside emergency income support measures on child income poverty in 2020

Housing Assistance Payment: Potential impacts on financial incentives to work. ESRI WP610, January 2019

Since March 2017, a new income-related housing support for those with a long-term housing need called Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) has been available throughout the state. This paper examines the potential impact on financial work incentives of transferring long-run Rent Supplement recipients onto HAP with tenants’ rental contributions assessed through a national Differential Rents scheme, initially proposed by the Housing Agency but yet to be implemented. While such a system would strengthen the financial incentive for most long-term Rent Supplement claimants to be in full-time paid work, a small minority would continue to face quite weak incentives. This is driven by the receipt of multiple means-tested benefits – in particular, jobseekers allowance and one-parent family payment – which results in some low-income individuals facing very high effective marginal tax rates from relatively low levels of earnings

Virtual Assistant That Selectively Announces Device Notifications

Users receive notifications for various events, e.g., incoming messages, device alerts, notifications from apps, etc. Currently, to avoid being inundated with notifications, users need to review and dismiss each notification, turn off certain notifications, or turn on a do-not-disturb mode of their device. This disclosure describes an intelligent virtual assistant that utilizes machine learning techniques to automatically determine whether a particular notification is important at any given moment. Based on the determined importance level, the virtual assistant can either proactively announce the notification, delay the notification announcement, or silence the notification

The short-term effects of management changes on watertable position and nutrients in shallow groundwater in a harvested peatland forest

This work was funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Environmental Protection Agency under the STRIVE program 2007 – 2013.peer-reviewedManagement changes such as drainage, fertilisation, afforestation and harvesting (clearfelling) of forested peatlands influence watertable (WT) position and groundwater concentrations of nutrients. This study investigated the impact of clearfelling of a peatland forest on WT and nutrient concentrations. Three areas were examined: (1) a regenerated riparian peatland buffer (RB) clearfelled four years prior to the present study (2) a recently clearfelled coniferous forest (CF) and (3) a standing, mature coniferous forest (SF), on which no harvesting took place. The WT remained consistently below 0.3 m during the pre-clearfelling period. Results showed there was an almost immediate rise in the WT after clearfelling and a rise to 0.15 m below ground level (bgl) within 10 months of clearfelling. Clearfelling of the forest increased dissolved reactive phosphorus concentrations (from an average of 28–230 μg L−1) in the shallow groundwater, likely caused by leaching from degrading brash mats.Environmental Protection AgencyDepartment of Agriculture, Food and the Marin

BUDGET PERSPECTIVES 2019, PAPER 1. LONE-PARENT INCOMES AND WORK INCENTIVES. July 2018

This paper examines how changes to the social welfare system for lone parents, such as the tightening of eligibility criteria for One-Parent Family Payment and the introduction of Jobseeker’s Transitional Payment, affected lone-parent incomes and work incentives. Our main contributions are threefold: we examine the cumulative effect of policy changes on the income of lone parents, and how changes to lone-parent-specific schemes affected income and work incentives, and quantify the extent to which childcare costs act as a labour market barrier for lone parents. Firstly, policy changes do not occur in a vacuum, therefore we assess how all policy from 2011 to 2018 affected lone-parent income. We find that changes to social welfare policy for lone parents resulted in income losses for employed lone parents, but had little effect on non-employed lone parents. All other changes over the period decreased the income of both employed and non-employed lone parents. We examine how these social welfare changes affected the work incentives. The reforms resulted in more lone parents having a greater financial incentive to be out of work, thus weakening the financial incentive to be in work. Finally, informed by an abundant literature regarding childcare costs as an obstacle to female labour supply, we highlight the impact of these costs on the incentive to be in work. We find that on accounting for childcare costs, being out of work becomes much more financially attractive for many lone parents. The availability of subsidies on childcare costs helps to reduce this disincentive, but even so, childcare costs represent a substantial barrier to lone-parent labour market participation

Mobile and Connected Device Security Considerations: A Dilemma for Small and Medium Enterprise Business Mobility?

Business mobility is rapidly becoming an everyday way of doing business. Mobile technologies, such as smartphones and connected devices, are enabling this business evolution. However, they are also creating new security concerns for the enterprise and its employees. Security experts are studying these increased security concerns to develop more secure practices and policies for the next generation mobile technologies. This paper describes these new mobile security concerns and discusses preliminary expert recommendations to reduce an increasing business risk. Although large enterprises have the resources to implement emerging security recommendations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may not be able to adopt the new recommendations because they lack IT resources and capabilities. This paper describes the SME dilemma: Embrace the mobility business strategy and adopt and invest in the necessary security technology, or give up their mobility business strategy to protect enterprise and customer data and information. Finally, the paper identifies future research questions concerning SME security awareness and capability to minimize security threats to develop more viable security practices