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Programme evaluation
IFS is involved in assessing the effectiveness of a number of labour market programmes, tax and transfer programmes and social programmes in a variety of fields, from education and training, to labour supply, childcare, health and welfare. In the presence of limited public resources, determining whether such policy interventions work and whether their cost is justified is of crucial importance and allows policy decisions to be guided by evidence on actual programme effectiveness.

The difficulty in estimating the causal impact of a programme is that we can never observe the outcome programme participants would have experienced had they not participated. Constructing this unobserved counterfactual is the central issue that evaluation methods need to address. In addition to the evaluation of specific government interventions, our research has been contributing to the development of econometric and statistical methods to address the evaluation problem.

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Year: 46 publications
13 October 2005
W05/19
Jaap Abbring and Gerard van den Berg
This paper examines the empirical analysis of treatment effects on duration outcomes from data that contain instrumental variation.
22 August 2005
Alan Krueger
This lecture provides an assessment of the potential for using measures of subjective well-being in the policy arena.
05 July 2005
Carl Emmerson, Christine Frayne, Sandra McNally and Olmo Silva
This paper looks at the impact of the Aimhigher:Excellence Challenge programme on pupils who have been exposed to it for one year.
05 July 2005
Carl Emmerson, Christine Frayne, Sandra McNally and Olmo Silva
This paper looks at the impact of Opportunity Bursaries on young adults who received payments in 2001-02 and 2002-03.
01 June 2005
Carl Emmerson, Sandra McNally and Costas Meghir
The chapter on “The economic evaluation of education initiatives” considers issues related to the economic evaluation of government interventions in the education system, followed by a discussion of recent evidence of the Education Maintenance Allowance and Excellence in Cities initiatives.
26 April 2005
EWP05/01
In this paper we evaluate the effect of a large welfare program in rural Mexico.
12 January 2005
BN54
In this Briefing Note, we will focus on the programme Familias en Acción, the conditional cash-transfer programme implemented by the Colombian government from 2001/02.
15 November 2004
EWP04/06
In this paper we evaluate the effect of a large nutrition programme in rural Colombia on children nutritional status, school achievement and female labour supply.
09 November 2004
We investigate the presence of short- and long-term effects from joining a Swedish labor market program vis-a-vis more intense job search in open unemployment.
01 June 2004
EWP04/04
In this paper we evaluate the effect of a large welfare program in rural Mexico.
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Impact on Society
An IFS assessment of the effectiveness of the Education Maintenance Allowance informed the Government’s decision to extend the policy nationwide in 2004.
We run a policy evaluation methods course that has trained practitioners inside and outside government how to conduct an evaluation and interpret the results.
We have written free software to implement matching methods, substantially reducing the barriers faced by practitioners in using such methods.
Our ERA analysis contributed to the evaluation literature and informed the Government about the validity of the experimental findings.
IFS evaluated the Pathways to Work programme. This work proved key to the policy debate about how to get disability benefit claimants in work.
IFS researchers found that the In-Work Credit encouraged lone parents to leave benefit more quickly but did not increase work retention.
IFS research has contributed to consultation with governments in developing countries on the design of health and welfare programmes.
Researchers at IFS have advised OPORTUNIDADES on the design and evaluation of new scholarships, and are carrying out its impact evaluation.