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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
01 February 2002
W02/03
The ‘Swedish model’ of active labour market programmes is investigated in relation to some crucial institutional features with two aims: examining how successful it has been in the context of the high unemployment atypically experienced by Sweden in the 1990s and trying to derive some general lessons as to which type of programme works best.
01 January 2002
W02/01
This paper investigates how effective the Swedish labour market programmes have been in improving the opportunities of unemployed individuals over the last decade.
01 December 2001
W01/25
The paper evaluates the differential performance of the six main types of Swedish programmes that were available to adult unemployed workers enTitled to unemployment benefits in the 1990s: labour market training, workplace introduction, work experience placement, relief work, trainee replacement and employment subsidies.
02 March 2001
Lorraine Dearden, Carl Emmerson, Christine Frayne, Costas Meghir, et al.
This evaluation focuses on the four models of EMA that were introduced into the
03 April 2000
W00/05
01 January 2000
This paper presents a review of non-experimental methods for the evaluation of social programmes.
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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.