Earnings Inequality, Returns to Education and Immigration into Ireland

By A. Barrett, J. Fitzgerald, Brian Nolan. Social Science Research Network, 2002

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing earnings inequality has been an important feature of the US and UK labour markets in recent years. The increase appears to be related to an increased demand for skilled labour and an increase in the returns to education. In this paper we examine what has happened to earnings inequality and the returns to education in Ireland between 1987 and 1997. We find that while both increased between 1987 and 1994, the increases slowed dramatically between 1994 and 1997. This is somewhat surprising as the exceptional growth in the Irish economy occurred from 1994 on. We look to immigration as being a contributing factor to this pattern because a large group of skilled workers flowed into the Irish labour market between 1994 and 1997. We develop a model of the Irish labour market and use it to simulate the impact of an increase in skilled labour. The simulation suggests that immigration did indeed reduce earnings inequality. This result is an interesting corollary to work from the US that shows the immigration of unskilled workers increasing earnings inequality.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d25b318833cc3862ef8cd6c6079afad3ac57a706

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. D. Duffy
2. A. Bergin
3. A. Barrett

In Gender Studies

1. D. Duffy
2. A. Bergin
3. A. Barrett

In Sociology and Political Science

1. D. Duffy
2. A. Bergin
3. A. Barrett

Citations in the corpus

• The Labour Market Characteristics and Labour Market Impacts of Immigrants in Ireland (2005, methodology): “Following the approach of Borjas et al (1997) and Barrett et al (2002) we undertake our analysis in a national framework, through the use of a structural model of the Irish labour market.”
• Immigrants in a Booming Economy: Analysing Their Earnings and Welfare Dependence (2007, unknown): “As shown by Barrett et al (2002) and Barrett et al (2006), immigrants in Ireland have notably higher levels of education than the domestic population.”
• Are Ireland's Immigrants Integrating into Its Labor Market? (2008, background): “As much of the analysis of the economic impacts of immigration to Ireland has been based on the inflow being highly skilled (Barrett, FitzGerald, and Nolan, 2002; Barrett, Bergin, and Duffy, 2006), one implication of the findings here is that the estimates of the impacts may need to be reestimated.”