Essays on the Irish labour market

The objective of this thesis is to explore issues in the Irish labour market from both the enterprise and employee perspective over the period 2005-2013. We draw on literature from the areas of job flows, displacement and monopsony. Our analysis is primarily based on the unique P35 linked employer-employee dataset, containing almost two million employee observations annually. We also link this dataset to the Census of Industrial Production survey in Chapter 3. Both sources are available from the Central Statistics Office, Ireland. The first chapter introduces the thesis by detailing its main goals, the importance of this work, as well as summarizing the following chapters. In Chapter 2, we provide an overview of the Irish labour market. Evidence suggests the economy experienced a significant increase in unemployment during the period. We also explore aspects of the resulting policy response. We investigate job flows in the labour market in Chapter 3. Results indicate that job destruction increased significantly between 2006 and 2010 while job creation declined. When examining the impact of changing export intensity on job creation and destruction, our results suggest a small effect. In Chapter 4, we estimate the earnings losses of displaced workers. We focus on two displacement events; mass-layoff and closure. Results indicate that workers who experience a mass-layoff incur greater losses relative to those displaced following a closure, as do those who switch to a new sector to secure re-employment following displacement. We examine the labour market for evidence of monopsony in Chapter 5. We find that estimated labour supply elasticities to the firm are low, implying that elasticity is not infinite as suggested by perfect competition, and so employers possess a degree of monopsony power. Chapter 6 summarizes the findings, highlights contributions to the literature, outlines policy implications and describes possible directions for future research.