UCD Researchers: Dr Kevin Denny; Dr Vincent Hogan; Dr David Madden; Dr Aogán Mulcahy; Dr Rosalia Alvarez-Vasquez; Professor Brendan Walsh; Dr Frank Walsh.
Other Researchers (International):Professor Orley Ashenfelter (Princeton), Professor Richard Blundell (University College London).
Empirically based evaluation of public policies and policy-making is an important area of growth in interdisciplinary research within ISSC. Such evaluation is vital both to the success of new policy initiatives and to remedying existing failures. Policy includes substantive policy addressed to particular issues. Two major areas of policy evaluation have been prioritised.
Welfare, Education and Training Policy
Informed debates about public policy, and wise government decisions require empirical evaluation of policies and policy proposals using the best scientific methods available. The necessity for such rigorous evaluation is particularly important in the policy domains that have preoccupied most Western societies since the 1960s, notably labour markets programmes aimed at fostering human capital (including education and training) and welfare policies aimed at problems of income redistribution. The objective is to apply the latest methods both to Ireland and other countries and to provide a research infrastructure in which investigators can interact while addressing research and policy questions.
There has been a remarkable development in both the quantity and quality of research in these areas of economics in Ireland, strengthened by the continuing close relationship between labour and public economists in UCD, TCD, NUI Maynooth and the ESRI in the Dublin Labour Studies Group – a forum for development of research ideas through informal lunchtime seminars and more formal feedback sessions. This has brought to fruition an outstanding level of research output. Researchers from the group have produced major publications in mainstream and field-specific economics journals and books and have, for example, been working as advisors to the UK government on education policy and for the OECD. They have also an important national emphasis to their research; advising the Department of Finance on labour market intervention policy and the Department of Enterprise and Employment on minimum wages are two recent examples.
This mix of national and international research emphasis is important to the group as is the very real and tangible contribution to public policy debates and the continuing development of this is a priority.Recently this close local collaboration has been enhanced by strong output-led relationships with leading international universities and research institutes and this application will develop these linkages further. Work with leading experts in Princeton (led by Professor Orley Ashenfelter) will focus in developing meta-analytic statistical methods that allow reliable inferences to be drawn from large numbers of diverse studies of similar policies. Collaboration with colleagues in the universities of Warwick is measuring the marginal effects of exposure to training, education and other policies.
Links are being formalised with the Leverhulme Centre for Quantitative Research Methods and Practice at University College London and the Institute for Fiscal StudiesThis newly created group, led by Professor Richard Blundell (a recent winner of the European Economist of the Year) and built around eminent local and international researchers including the Nobel Prize laureates in Economics for 2001 (Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Professor Dan McFadden of Berkeley), aims to provide a focal point for the development of microdata research methods and practice and to stimulate the development of skills in methods and practice in academia, government and the private sector. Professor Ian Walker, University of Warwickis a visiting fellow of ISSC who is developing local expertise in the methods of modern policy analysis. A policy workshop led by Professor Walker is held every month to track the latest state of research in particular areas of policy thinking relevant to Ireland, such as: lifelong learning; welfare-to-work; training the disadvantaged; and the long- run issues associated with lone parenthood. The presence of Professor Walker at ISSC will be complemented by the recently announced appointment of Dr Colm Harmon as the Nuffield Foundation Career Development Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre in UCL for 2002 & 2003.
Educational Disadvantage and Financing of Education
The second initiative is the funding of a programme of research on educational disadvantage and educational financing with the Centre for the Economics of Education at the London School of Economics.
A child is defined as in poverty if they are living in a household which is below the median net income. A number of major factors may lie behind child poverty rates. There is clearly a high and growing proportion of lone mothers in the population, coupled with the related problem of a high and growing number of teenage pregnancies. Moreover, low levels of child support compliance and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that unemployment benefit is, in many countries, now independent of the number of children.
Given government commitments to eliminating child poverty within a generation, a number of policies have been introduced to deal directly with this issue by way of income transfers – but, given the evidence that child poverty is associated with growing up in a poor household, all of this policy direction rests on a premise that giving poor parents more money makes for better children. This is very difficult to show in the empirical literature.
Research on changes in Canadian tax law for example illustrates how the alternatives to direct income transfers for tackling child poverty should include methods to enhance the employability of poor parents through education. Early school leaving also seems likely to be an important part of the transmission mechanism that induces the strong observed intergenerational correlation of incomes and poverty between successive generations.
This work is well represented in the work of the ISSC research team. Dónal O’Neill and Olive Sweetman in research published in 1998 provide direct evidence that parental background is an important determinant of a child's future welfare. For example, a son whose father was unemployed twenty years earlier is almost twice as likely to be unemployed as a son whose father was not unemployed. This dependency remains significant after controlling for a range of characteristics including education, ability and family composition. Similarly this work is central to the research at LSE. The Director of the CEE, Professor Steve Machin reported for the Rowntree Foundation a clear intergenerational correlation between fathers and both sons and daughters in terms of labour market earnings and years of schooling based on analysis of a UK birth cohort study.
Health Research Board programme (with Economic and Social Research Institute ESRI); The Provision and Use of Health Services; Health Inequalities and Health and Social Gain.
