Sean Lyons

University College Dublin | UCD · School of Economics

Globally, coal is still widely used for heating. However, there are concerns about its effect on ambient air quality and health. We estimated the effect of bans prohibiting the sale and use of so-called "smoky coal" on the prevalence of chronic lung disease in older people. Our identification strategy relied on the phased extension of smoky coal ba...

Evidence concerning the effects of indicators of waterborne pathogens on healthcare systems is of importance for policymaking, future infrastructure considerations and healthcare planning. This paper examines the association between the detection of E . coli in water tests associated with drinking water supplies and the use of healthcare services b...

This paper examines consumers' intra-operator mobile phone plan switching in Ireland. It models the factors associated with switching outcomes, including the direction of change in expenditure and whether those who are observed to switch plans tend to arrive at more or less optimal plans given their usage. A dataset is employed that combines survey...

This research contributes to an emerging evidence base that considers a possible relationship between exposure to road traffic noise and mental distress. This study aimed to determine whether chronic exposure to road traffic noise was associated with quality of life or various measures of mental distress. We spatially linked high-quality modelled n...

Using data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), linked to administrative data on high-speed broadband availability from infrastructure maps, this study examines patterns of Internet uses and psychosocial outcomes for over 3500 people aged 50 plus across Ireland. High-speed broadband availability is associated with higher reported le...

Objective Large reductions in inpatient length of stay and inpatient bed supply have occurred across health systems in recent years. However, the direction of causation between length of stay and bed supply is often overlooked. This study examines the impact of changes to inpatient bed supply, as a result of recession-induced healthcare expenditure...

Background The World Health Organization published updated Environmental Noise Guidelines in 2018. Included are recommended limit values for environmental noise exposure based on systematic reviews for a range of health outcomes, including cognitive impairment. There is emerging evidence in the literature that chronic exposure to road traffic noise...

Background: Recent reforms in Ireland, as outlined in Sláintecare, the report of the cross-party parliamentary committee on health, are focused on shifting from a hospital-centric system to one where non-acute care plays a more central role. However, these reforms were embarked on in the absence of timely and accurate information about the capacity...

There is substantial evidence of links between green spaces and better health status. However, the ways in which green space are measured are varied, including both objective and subjective measures. This paper examines factors associated with individuals’ perceiving a lack of open public space, including the objective quantity of green space and w...

This report develops baseline estimates of expenditure in 2019 for (‘non-acute’) primary, community and long-term care services in Ireland, and projects expenditures for these services to 2035. It provides expenditure projections across different pressure scenarios that incorporate varying assumptions about the drivers of health and social care exp...

Inequities in access to general practitioner (GP) services are a key policy concern given the role of GPs as gatekeepers to secondary care services. Geographic or area-level factors, including local deprivation and supply of healthcare providers, are important elements of access. In considering how area-level deprivation relates to GP utilisation,...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world to cancel face-to-face teaching, close campus facilities, and displace staff and students to work and learn from home. Given the persistent nature of the pandemic, many HEIs have continued to deliver courses online and/or use a blended learning approach. However...

A new statutory home support scheme was proposed in the 2017 Sláintecare report (Houses of the Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Healthcare, 2017), and was included in the 2020 ‘Programme for Government’ (Department of the Taoiseach, 2020). The detailed design of the scheme has not yet been published. To help inform policymakers on the level an...

Hospital capacity constraints have been a key factor in Ireland’s policy response to Covid-19. But as demand for healthcare continues to grow, and with the risk of a renewed surge of the virus, new thinking will be required to meet healthcare needs and support economic recovery.

This report presents an exploratory examination of the international literature on the provision of specialist support for persons with disabilities living in the community, in the context of Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Academic literature and international evidence in transitioning to person-c...

Formal home care is an appropriate substitute for acute hospital care for many older people. However, limited empirical evidence exists on the extent of substitution between the supply of home care and hospital use. This study examines whether patients from areas with a better supply of home care have lower inpatient length of stay (LOS). We link a...

Citizen science allows members of the public to engage with scientific inquiry, and is increasingly being employed to monitor environmental change. Some previous research explores the demographic characteristics of participants in environmental citizen science projects. Design of recruitment campaigns and selection of activities for citizen science...

Consumers who actively search for better broadband deals may benefit from lower prices or improved service quality compared to those who do not. If, however, consumers differ in their propensity to engage with the market and actively search, these potential benefits may not accrue equally. This paper investigates differences in consumer search acti...

This report documents the wide-ranging impact of school building closures on teaching and learning in second-level schools in Ireland. The closure of all educational settings was mandated by the Irish government from 12 March 2020 as part of the government response to contain the spread of COVID-19. The closures occurred with immediate effect on th...

Background: Links between air pollution and asthma are less well established for older adults than some younger groups. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations are widely used as an indicator of transport-related air pollution, and some literature suggests NO2 may directly affect asthma. Methods: This study used data on 8162 adults >50 years old i...

Background: While exposure to urban green spaces has been associated with various physical health benefits, the evidence linking these spaces to lower BMI, particularly among older people, is mixed. We ask whether footpath availability, generally unobserved in the existing literature, may mediate exposure to urban green space and help explain this...

On 29 February 2020 the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was announced in the Republic of Ireland. In subsequent weeks, progressively more restrictive control measures were introduced in an attempt to ‘flatten the curve’ and specifically to relieve pressure on emergency and critical care services. Using the most up to date data available on emergen...

The classical monocentric city model suggests that property prices decrease and transport costs rise with distance to the urban centre, implying that employees face a trade-off between long commutes and high housing costs when making location decisions. Accordingly, some commuters might be forced to take on longer commutes due to rising rents in ce...

The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is often characterised as ‘invisible’. Using data drawn from censuses in both jurisdictions, we show a substantial discontinuity in commuting behaviour at the Irish border. Residents on both sides of the border have a low propensity to work on the other side. Local areas in Northern Ir...

This paper demonstrates the use of “big data” to target behavioural interventions that aim to reduce environmental pollution. The data relate to ongoing noncompliance with the EU Nitrates Directive among farmers in Ireland. We compiled more than 1.2 million records from disparate administrative data, then employed multi-level statistical analysis t...

Children live in a technology-mediated world, and most young people use a variety of technologies in their daily lives. However, despite intense public discourse, we have little empirical evidence on how technology use impacts on children's development across a number of psycho-social domains. Research that has been conducted tends to be largely sm...

Background : While exposure to urban green spaces has been associated with various physical health benefits, the evidence linking these spaces to lower BMI, particularly among older people, is mixed. We suggest that dimensions of urban green space accessibility, which are generally unobserved in the existing literature, may be a source of this vola...

Background : While exposure to urban green spaces has been associated with various physical health benefits, the evidence linking these spaces to lower BMI, particularly among older people, is mixed. We suggest that dimensions of green space accessibility, which are generally unobserved in the existing literature, may be a source of this volatility...

This report provides new evidence on key factors that affect patients’ length of stay (LOS) in Irish public acute hospitals. Overall, the report finds that greater supply of home care and long-term residential care (LTRC) could reduce patients’ LOS and thereby reduce delayed discharges, particularly for older people, in Irish hospitals. This is th...

Background: While exposure to urban green spaces has been associated with various physical health benefits, the evidence linking these spaces to lower BMI, particularly among older people, is mixed. We ask whether footpath availability, generally unobserved in the existing literature, may mediate exposure to urban green space and help explain this...

Background: While exposure to urban green spaces has been associated with various physical health benefits, the evidence linking these spaces to lower BMI, particularly among older people, is mixed. We ask whether footpath availability, generally unobserved in the existing literature, may mediate exposure to urban green space and help explain this...

This report provides evidence on the supply of and need for non-acute primary, community and long-term care across geographic areas in Ireland in 2014. This is the first report to be published from the Health Research Board-funded project ‘An inter-sectoral analysis by geographic area of the need for and the supply and utilisation of health service...

Consumer switching can play a significant role in enabling competitive retail markets. This paper examines the factors influencing consumer switching across 14 different retail markets in 27 European countries (EU27) using a micro-econometric analysis of consumer switching behaviour data from the European Commission’s Consumer Market Monitoring Sur...

This paper examines the effects of deploying digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband on job creation within existing firms. We use spatial information on broadband and firm locations, exploiting geographical and temporal variation in broadband availability in Ireland during 2007-2014. This is linked to a panel of firm-level data on employment and o...

Children are increasingly getting access to mobile phones, and mobile phone ownership is now occurring at a time in children’s lives where their literacy and numeracy skills are developing. We examine whether there is an association between early mobile phone ownership and academic outcomes and whether delaying mobile phone ownership benefits the d...

In this article, we first summarise trends of land use changes and urbanisation in Ireland since 1990 using data from the Corine Land Cover program. In doing so, we compare the developments in Ireland with other European countries. Second, we propose a statistical test for the presence of sprawl using conditional and unconditional convergence tests...

Digital technologies have become an increasingly prominent feature of children’s lives both within and outside educational environments (McCoy, Quail, and Smyth 2012). Despite considerable media debate, we have little robust evidence on the impact of technology use on children’s development, both academically and socially. Much of the literature in...

This year has seen a prominent focus in public discourse on digital technologies and their impact on children’s development and wellbeing. The debate has often been narrowly focused on whether to ban mobile phones and other personal devices (in schools and other settings), but commentators have also argued that giving children and young people the...

This research examines some of the multiple benefits of a home energy efficiency upgrade programme for social housing tenants. Employing a quasi-experimental approach, we examine a range of objectively measured and self-reported outcomes, including metered gas consumption, for a control and upgrade group, before and after the upgrade. We drew our s...

While broadband is widely believed to augment productivity, there is little firm-level evidence of a generalised causal effect. In this paper we examine whether the introduction of digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband services increased firms' productivity in nine sub-sectors within the services and distribution sector in Ireland from 2006 to 20...

Equity in access to healthcare services is regarded as an important policy goal in the organisation of modern healthcare systems. Physical accessibility to healthcare services is recognised as a key component of access. Older people are more frequent and intensive users of healthcare, but reduced mobility and poorer access to transport may negative...

HSE EPA Data Policy Workshop From Open Data to GDPR Data Sharing Challenges – Environment, Health & Wellbeing HSE EPA Environment, Health & Wellbeing Conference 2-4pm Wednesday 7th November 2018 Radisson Blu Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin The workshop was comprised of two panels lasting one hour each. Each panel was comprised of 4 people who made 8-10...

This paper tests whether higher exposure to coastal blue space is associated with lower risk of depression using data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), a nationally representative longitudinal study of people aged fifty and over in Ireland. We contribute to the literature on blue space and health by (i) using scores from the Cent...

Digital technologies are an increasingly prominent feature of children’s lives, but we have little robust evidence on their impact on child development, academic and socio-emotional. We examine the role of early mobile phone ownership in children's academic development. Using longitudinal data from Growing Up in Ireland, we examine the impact on re...

Despite long-standing market liberalisation and efforts to reduce switching costs, many consumers have never switched telecoms provider. This paper investigates how consumer and service characteristics relate to switching intentions, using a sample of fixed-line broadband, mobile telephony and landline telephony customers from a 2015 survey conduct...

Feedback on residential energy consumption has long been identified as an effective demand side management instrument to encourage household energy conservation. This paper explores the heterogeneous treatment effects of a DSM programme on residential gas consumption across different groups of households categorised by their socio-economic and hous...

We examine the association between living in an urban area with more or less green space and the probability of being obese. This work involves the creation of a new dataset which combines geo-coded data at the individual level from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing with green space data from the European Urban Atlas 2012. We find evidence sug...

This paper analyzes the impact of broadband infrastructure, along with a range of other local characteristics such as motorways and other infrastructure, availability of human capital, and access to third-level educational facilities, on the location of new business establishments. The sample period spans the introduction and recent history of broa...

Consistently cheaper fuel prices in one jurisdiction compared to a neighbouring jurisdiction should, holding other factors constant, lead to greater demand for fuel in the country with the lower price, due in part to legal fuel tourism. Fuel tourism, cross-border demand for fuel, represents an important source of tax revenues to the Exchequer but a...

This paper examined the relationship between radon risk and lung cancer prevalence using a novel dataset combining spatially-coded survey data with a radon risk map. A logit model was employed to test for significant associations between a high risk of indoor radon and lung cancer prevalence using data on 5590 people aged 50+ from The Irish Longitu...

In purely economic terms, mortgage arrears can pose a risk to the stability of banks and limit households’ future access to credit. Moreover, arrears have social ramifications: they reduce aspects of households’ well-being and health, and addressing such negative effects can lead to a requirement for higher social spending by governments. It is the...

This article examines variation in the income elasticity of household energy demand across the energy expenditure distribution using expenditure data from the five most recent Household Budget Surveys (HBSs) in Ireland: the 1987, 1994/1995, 1999/2000, 2004/2005 and 2009/2010 HBS. The analysis uses a two-stage instrumental variable quantile regressi...

Smart-metering allows electricity utilities to provide consumers with better information on their energy usage and to apply time-of-use pricing. These measures have been shown to reduce electricity consumption and induce time-shifting of demand. Less is known about how they affect residential energy efficiency investment behaviour. We use data from...

The Irish government has invested significantly in the provision of high-speed broadband to all second-level schools in the country, as part of Ireland's digital strategy. In many cases this initiative represents a significant upgrade from a slow and often unreliable broadband connection that has inhibited the use of ICT within education. However,...

This paper investigates how retail broadband prices, choice and quality are changing over time. Using a data set containing daily observations of plans offered in Ireland from 2007 to 2013, this paper applies hedonic modelling techniques to observe the changing pricing of service characteristics. Although we find that average nominal prices remain...

This paper is an empirical study of the relationship between the energy performance rating of residential homes in the Dublin market between 2009 and 2014 and their market prices, controlling for building type, size, age and location. Initial results suggest that energy efficiency has a significant, positive relationship with list price. A 50-point...

Carbon pricing, technological supports, and energy subsidies comprise the most‐often implemented energy and climate policies. The cost of these policies has grown in recent years, resulting in equity impacts receiving greater attention by academics, policymakers, and the general public. While precise impacts are specific to particular circumstances...

Household failure to minimize the total costs of energy-consuming investments has become known as the “energy efficiency gap.” This paper explores if this is partly the result of imperfect information related to future energy costs. We test this hypothesis by adding 5-year consumption cost labels to the tumble dryer lineup of four outlets of an Iri...

Extensive previous work on factors affecting regional development has considered the impact of aggregate measures of infrastructure like the public capital stock or individual infrastructures such as motorways. More recently the impact of ICT infrastructure, and in particular broadband, has received attention. This paper analyses the impact on new...

As part of Ireland's National Digital Strategy, high-speed broadband is being rolled out to all second-level schools to support greater use of information and communication technology (ICT) in education. This programme signals a move from slow and unreliable broadband connections for many schools to a guaranteed high-speed connection with technical...

This paper examines the determinants of residential gas demand in Ireland using a micro-econometric analysis of the daily gas consumption panel data from Ireland's Smart Metering Gas Consumer Behavioural Trial. It also investigates the effectiveness of the demand side management stimuli that were tested during the Smart Metering Trial. The analysis...

Along with environmental impacts, renewable energy affects societal welfare through subsidy costs and electricity price changes. Identifying the distribution of both these impacts is of increasing importance as deployment grows. Subsidies are commonly financed by consumption-based Public Service Obligation (PSO) levies. We compare the distributiona...

Abstract: This paper combines data from a government programme providing broadband access to primary schools in Ireland with anonymised survey microdata on schools’, teachers’ and pupils use of the internet to examine the links between public subsidies, classroom use of the internet and educational performance. The microdata are drawn from the 9-ye...

We estimate the effects of adopting DSL broadband on firm productivity and productivity growth allowing for differing broadband speeds. We use a two-stage least squares estimator with geographical broadband availability as an instrument to address some potential endogeneity problems in a panel of Irish manufacturing firms. While more productive fir...

This book brings together research relating to the economics of disability in Ireland. It addresses a range of issues of relevance to the economic circumstances of people with disabilities, considering topics such as social inclusion, poverty, the labour market, living standards and public policy. It also considers issues of specific relevance to c...