"Ireland experienced dramatic growth in the economy and employment in the second half of the 1990s. This paper examines the consequences of that boom for returns to education and wage inequality using data from the Living in Ireland Survey for the years 1994, 1997, and 2001. Rapid economic growth is often expected to lead to increased returns to education and thus to rising wage inequality. We find fairly stable returns to education and falling wage inequality for men throughout the period, partly due to strong demand for unskilled labour, which helped maintain low-skilled wages. For women the wage premium for a university degree fell between 1997 and 2001, as did wage inequality. We argue that for women, low-skilled wages may have been kept up by the introduction of the minimum wage in 2000, and high-skilled wages fell due to a rapid rise in the supply of highly qualified women."

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