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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: 52 publications
04 May 2013
This presentation was delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Labor Economists in Boston, USA on 4th May 2013
05 July 2012
This talk gives an overview of evaluation methods in microeconomic policy, in particular those based on randomized trials and IV methods.
03 July 2012
Erich Battistin, Michele De Nadai and Barbara Sianesi
This presentation was given at the fifth ESRC Research Methods Festival at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, on 3 July 2012.
03 July 2012
This presentation was given at the fifth ESRC Research Methods Festival at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, on 3 July 2012.
01 May 2012
Economics has a long tradition of studying causal questions. Over the past few decades causal methods have been widely employed in measuring the impact of government policies.
27 September 2011
From GP commissioning to children's centres, swaths of government policy could have been tested to ensure its effectiveness. The electorate should now demand that it is.
14 September 2011
This report analyses the impact that ERA has had on a variety of outcomes experienced by working members of the New Deal for Lone Parents and Working Tax Credit target groups, as well as on the tax year earnings of working members of the New Deal 25 plus target group.
01 August 2011
W11/14
This paper uses administrative data to evaluate a targeted, time-limited policy aimed at getting lone parents off benefits and into work.
01 June 2011
Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay and Imran Rasul
We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long-standing research questions relating to firm behavior.
01 January 2011
The aim of this report is to explore how the four-year findings from the experimental research relate to the impacts that would have been experienced, on average, by all the people who were eligible for ERA, had they participated in the programme.
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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.