Browse IFS
Publication types
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.

See all current research projects for this subject

Search

Title (or part of title)
Author surname (or part of surname)

Year: 52 publications
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.
05 March 2004
01 March 2004
29 January 2004
This is the third report of the longitudinal quantitative evaluation of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) pilots and the first since the government announced that EMA is to be rolled out nationally from 2004.
01 November 2003
W03/20
Regression, matching, control function and instrumental variables methods for recovering the impact of education on individual earnings are reviewed for single treatment and sequential multiple treatments with and without heterogeneous returns.
52 results    previous    1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6     next

Browse publications & research

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.