ESRC Institute for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy

The ESRC has funded a Centre at IFS since 1991, which since 2018 has been recognised as a global centre of excellence and granted official ESRC Research Institute status.

The overarching objectives of the Institute are to:

• make major scientific progress in understanding how individuals and firms behave and how they react to government policy;
• have substantial impact on policy in the fields of taxation, labour market, education, welfare, pensions, and public finances;
• build technical and policy capacity in a new generation of highly-skilled researchers.

The Institute underpins and is fundamental to IFS's research agenda, and is of central importance to our ability to integrate research with policy analysis. ESRC Centre funding enables the IFS to maintain the combination of impartiality, rigour and authority that is essential if we are to continue to achieve wide-ranging impact on policy and to inform the public debate.

Institute funding contributes to Microeconomic Insights, which is a home for accessible summaries of high quality research which informs the public about microeconomic issues that are, or should be, in the public’s eye.