Education and Employment Dynamics in Irish Regions using Fixed Effects
Does an increase in tertiary education attainment contribute to higher employment levels across Irish regions?
The problem: Does educational attainment causally improve labour market outcomes across Irish regions — or does it just correlate with them?
Economic analysis: Fixed effects OLS panel model on 12 years of CSO regional data, using within-group variation to isolate the causal effect while controlling for time-invariant confounders.
TL;DR: Education raises regional employment and wages — and this is the cleanest causal estimate of that effect using Irish administrative data.
