Projects

At any one time, ISER is involved in a wide range of cutting edge social and economic research across many disciplines. Completed projects

Opening the Black Box: towards a transparent and widely-used tax-benefit model for the UK

Enhancing EUROMOD-UK to create a widely accessible, simplified, transparent and policy-relevant tax-benefit model.

An investigation of the impact of the National Living Wage on earnings, with a focus on pay differentials

Investigating to what extent the recent hikes in the minimum wage have impacted on wage progression and pay differentials.

Understanding and improving data linkage consent in surveys

Maximising informed consent by investigating what influences the decision of survey respondents to allow their data to be linked to administrative records.

Investigating people-place effects in the UK using linked longitudinal survey and administrative data

Providing new evidence for the UK on the presence and relative contribution of place effects to individual social and economic outcomes.

European Cohort Development Project (ECDP)

Building a case for a European Research Infrastructure that will provide comparative longitudinal survey data on child and young adult well-being over the next 25 years.

Impact of the Universal Free School Meal policy

Assessing the success of the Free School Meals policy in improving children’s educational achievement, social behaviour and health.

Inequality, early adult life courses and economic outcomes at mid-life in comparative context (EQUALLIVES)

A cross-country investigation into how education, labour market and family choices create inequality across the life-course.

Integrating research infrastructure for European expertise on inclusive growth from data to policy (InGRID-2)

Follow-up to the successful InGRID project aiming to advance the integration and innovation of distributed social sciences research infrastructures on ‘poverty, living conditions and social policies’ as well as ‘working conditions, vulnerability and labour policies’.

Access to health care, health outcomes and hospital performance in Brazilian cities

Assessing the impact of recent innovations within Brazil’s national health system on mortality and hospitalization rates, and on the efficiency of the health system.

Welfare dependence and poverty traps: evaluating the contribution of health shocks and health policy using administrative data

Investigating the extent to which public health provision enhances the capacity for social protection in Brazil.

The impact of a personalised blood pressure warning on health behaviour

Assessing to what extent clinical information on an individual’s health status could influence their behaviours.

Developing a longitudinal study of indebtedness

Charting people’s experience of debt and utilisation of debt advice.

Risk aversion, earnings uncertainty and labour supply

Examining the relationship between the growth in insecure and unstable forms of employment and peoples’ behaviour in relation to seeking and remaining in work.

Exploiting the existing biomarker data available in CLOSER: social position, age and allostatic load

Cataloguing the biomarker data available in the Cohort & Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resource (CLOSER) and other significant longitudinal studies, to develop a gold standard for allostatic load measurement, while informing the scientific community of the availability of biomarkers for research in the social- biological agenda.

Investigating and reducing non-sampling errors on EU-SILC

Investigating the extent and nature of non-sampling errors and exploring ways of reducing such errors in the future.

Respondent-targeted survey design features

Targeting design features to reduce survey costs and improve survey participation.

The prevalence and persistence of ethnic and racial harassment and its impact on health: a longitudinal analysis

Groundbreaking research into the prevalence and persistence of ethnic and racial harassment and its impact on health.

Understanding household finance through better measurement

Transforming our understanding of the dynamics of living standards.

Income and fertility: evidence from Norway in the last two centuries

Investigating how the timing of births varies across the business cycle.

SOUTHMOD: simulating tax and benefit policies for development

New microsimulation models to explore the impacts of social protection and tax systems in developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia

Application of microsimulation models in the analysis of taxes and social benefits in Croatia (AMMATSBC)

Applying microsimulation models of Croatian taxes and benefits in public policy and academic analysis to demonstrate their effectiveness

BOOST2018, the ground-breaking study of student life

BOOST2018 is a study undertaken by researchers at the University of Essex to better understand students’ life at university, the issues they may face in their daily life, their aspirations, expectations, attitudes, and their outcomes.

How can biomarkers and genetics improve our understanding of society and health?

A ground-breaking £1.4 million ESRC-funded study is gathering evidence to help policy makers understand how behaviours and socio-economic factors impact on the nation’s health

Inequality in higher education outcomes in the UK: subjective expectations, preferences, and access to information

Higher education is a priority in UK government policy, but access to university is still unequal, with students from well-off families being more likely to apply for a degree

Information, expectations and transition to higher education

Examining which expectations and perceptions are held by students that may make them stay on in full-time post-compulsory schooling and apply to university.

Income and poverty dynamics: measuring instability, volatility and persistence

Providing new evidence for Britain earnings instability and improving the measurement of household living standards