Author: Aedín Doris

Economic and Social Review: Spring Issue Published

The Spring edition of the ESR has been published. The full edition is available here.

As usual, the journal carries a wide range of articles on Economic and Social Science topics. Below are the titles, with links to the individual articles. Happy reading!

The Long-term Consequences of the Irish Marriage Bar by Irene Mosca and Robert E. Wright

Bonding and Bridging Social Capital: The Determinants of English Language Fluency and Its Effects on the Labour Market Outcome of International Students in Ireland by Zizhen Wang

Private Health Insurance in Ireland: Trends and Determinants by Kanika Kapur

The Base of Party Political Support in Ireland: An Update by David Madden

Respect Your Elders: Evidence from Ireland’s R&D Tax Credit Reform by Jean Acheson and Rory Malone

Ireland’s Fiscal Spending Multipliers by Kate Ivory, Eddie Casey and Niall Conroy

Modelling and Measuring Gains from Labour Market Desegregation in Northern Ireland by Hannah KM Kling

Save the date: September 7 – Policy Forum on Higher Education Funding

I am organising a policy conference on the above topic to be held at the RIA on Dawson Street from 9.30-12.30 on Thursday, September 7.

The main focus will be on the potential role of income-contingent student loans in HE funding.

The morning will begin with short presentations by five speakers, including Bruce Chapman (Australian National University), Lorraine Dearden (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London), Charles Larkin (Trinity College), Senator Aodhan O Riordain (to be confirmed) and myself. This will be followed by a 60-90 minute discussion session. The event will be chaired by Frances Ruane (ESRI).

I’ll post a detailed programme here when it’s finalized.

Update: Senator O Riordain has confirmed and the final programme is available here.

Recent Research on Income-Contingent Student Loans

(This is a joint post with Darragh Flannery of UL and Kevin Denny of UCD).

Income-contingent loans (ICLs) for students were one of the options proposed by the Cassells Report on Future Higher Education Funding when it was published last year (see here). The topic has been back in the news again in recent weeks because of the dissemination of a paper[1] by Shaen Corbet and Charles Larkin, which claims to show that an ICL could not work in Ireland.

Two of us (Doris and Flannery) have done research directly in the area of ICLs – indeed Doris’s research ended up being used by the Cassells Expert Group to provide illustrations of how an ICL might work in Ireland. We both found, using different data sets and different ICL parameters (income thresholds, repayment rates etc.) that the discounted value of loan repayments would be about 75% of the loan values, even when accounting for graduate emigration.[2] Under these repayment rates, there would be no problem operating an ICL in Ireland.

The third poster (Denny) has written papers on the determinants of participation in higher education (HE), the returns to education and related topics and so has a strong research interest in the effects of funding on access to HE.

We were all surprised by the reports of Larkin and Corbet’s results and so went off to read the paper. This had added interest as the research appears to be influencing policy makers.  Given this context and with apologies for the length of the post, we have decided to make our assessment of it public.

Continue reading “Recent Research on Income-Contingent Student Loans”

Future Funding of Higher Education Conference: Presentations Now Available

A conference on the Future Funding of Higher Education in Ireland was held in Maynooth University on Wednesday last. It was a very good day, with excellent speakers and great interaction between the audience and the speakers.

The presentations have now been posted online, and are available here.

Save the Date: September 30 Conference on Higher Education Funding in Maynooth

On Wednesday, September 30, we are holding a one-day conference on ‘Higher Education Funding: Drawing on the International Experience’ in Maynooth.

The context for this conference is the debate on how to fund higher education in Ireland. In 2014, the Minister for Education established an Expert Group on Future Funding for Higher Education, and the motivation for the conference is to inform the discussion about the choice of funding options available; we have a particular interest in the interaction between funding mechanisms and differential access to higher education along socioeconomic lines.

International speakers include Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has written extensively on the issue of higher education funding in the US; Claire Crawford of Warwick University and the IFS, who has written several detailed analyses of the UK system; and Bruce Chapman of the Australian National University, whose name is particularly associated with income-contingent student loans, both in terms of his academic research and his role as policy advisor to many governments.

Local speakers include Rory O’Donnell of NESC and Delma Byrne of Maynooth University.

The conference will be open to all. I’ll post further details here in the coming weeks.

Update: Full details are now available here.