ISER is delighted to announce that top economist Mike Brewer is joining ISER as Professor of Economics.
Labour market expert, Mike joins the ISER team from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. His main research interests are in how welfare benefits, labour market programmes and the tax system affects decisions made by households. He has written widely about welfare reform, and especially the changes to social security benefits and tax credits proposed by the current UK Government. He has been a long-time proponent of a simpler and more integrated welfare system, and his work on an integrated benefit system has been acknowledged as having informed current government policy.
Mike has evaluated the impact of various welfare reforms on labour market outcomes. He has a broad interest in how government policy shapes family life, and has researched how welfare benefits affect fertility, how women’s labour market behaviour changes after they have children, and trends in childcare use. He has an interest in measuring poverty and living standards, and in understanding trends in income inequality in the UK. He has a long background in using microsimulation methods, and a newer interest in evaluation methods, which he will pursue through being Director of Programme Evaluation for Policy Analysis, a node of the ESRC-funded National Centre for Research Methods.
While at the IFS he was a Deputy Director and head of the Direct Tax and Welfare research team. Before that, he was an economist in the civil service, and studied economics at the universities of Cambridge and Bristol.
“I have always been impressed by ISER’s reputation as a place where high quality micro-data is both produced and analysed. I’m very excited about joining ISER and look forward to making contributions to its work on economic and social policy, work and the family, and microsimulation methods.”