Biography

Irene Mosca holds a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK).  From 2010-2018, she worked with The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), in Trinity College Dublin, coordinating the economics domain and chairing the socioeconomic research group. She joined Maynooth University in 2019.
Irene’s research interests are in the fields of applied health, population and labour economics. Irene has established a strong record of research and published articles in international peer-reviewed journals, including Demography, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Oxford Economics Papers, the Journal of Population Economics, Labour Economics, Economics Letters, the Journal of Economic Psychology, Economics and Human Biology, Bulletin of Economic Research, Scottish Journal of Political Economy and the International Journal of Public Health.
Irene is currently a member of the External Advisory Group for IGEES (the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service) and a research fellow at the IZA Institute for Study of Labor and the Global Labor Organisation (GLO).
From 2022 to 2025, she was an Executive Committee Member of the Irish Society for Women in Economics (ISWE).

Abstract

This paper examines the effects that working for pay and volunteering have on the mental health of older British women and men. Individual level data from five waves of The UK Household Longitudinal Study is used. The estimation strategy is two-fold. First, pooled cross-sectional regression analysis is used to investigate the associations of working for pay and volunteering with mental health. Second, the longitudinal nature of the data is exploited more fully to investigate whether changes in working for pay and volunteering from one wave to another cause changes in mental health. Evidence of a positive relationship between working for pay and volunteering with mental health is found, with the cross-sectional associations being largest in magnitude.

Join the NIPE seminars on Google calendar: https://bit.ly/2LKkPyV