ESRC Society Today

For immediate release

New research into the use of microdata to understand human behaviour and inform better policymaking will be supported for the next five years by £3.1million funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). There will also be emphasis on education and training for new and existing researchers and users of microdata. The funding will be invested in The Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP), previously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which is a joint venture between the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London (UCL).

Researchers will develop and apply tools to extract information about how people behave within society from non-experimental data recording the circumstances, actions and experiences of individuals, households, enterprises, and other organisations that influence society. Findings will be used to inform policy in areas such as education choice, savings behaviour, health investment decisions, housing and location choices and housing markets, inequality and wage dynamics.

Andrew Chesher, director of CeMMAP and Professor of Economics at UCL, said, "Our research programme opens up the opportunity to build in the UK a major world presence in microdata training and research. We will develop new tools and approaches to extracting knowledge from the wealth of microdata becoming available, and gain crucial new understanding of the dynamics and variability of human behaviour in economic and social contexts." 

The Centre has, over the last five years, already built a wide network of Research Fellows in the UK and internationally, including two Nobel Prize winners: James Heckman (University of Chicago) and Daniel McFadden (UC Berkeley). The Centre also runs the EU-funded Research Training Network, Microdata Methods and Practice, collaborating in research and training with institutions from Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. 

Professor Ian Diamond, Chief Executive of ESRC, said; "This new funding underlines the ESRC’s commitment to supporting leading-edge research. I am also delighted that CeMMAP will engage in capacity building which reinforces our own dedication to future-proofing the supply of social scientists within the UK."

As well as carrying out ground-breaking research, CeMMAP will deliver a structured programme of training courses for civil servants, professional economists and social scientists, advanced masterclasses that survey whole fields up to the research frontier, user group workshops, seminars and conferences. It will train doctoral students and provide exciting research opportunities for postdoctoral researchers.

Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said, "CeMMAP's research will play an essential role in underpinning the policy work carried out at IFS, allowing researchers to use the most advanced econometric techniques for rigorous policy analysis. The training courses help to bring the methods they develop directly to policy makers and commercial economists." 

For further information, contact:

• Professor Andrew Chesher on 0207 679 5857 e-mail: andrew.chesher@ucl.ac.uk
• Alexandra Saxon or Annika Howard at ESRC, on 01793 413032/413119  
• Emma Hyman or Bonnie Brimstone at IFS on 020 7291 4800
• Judith Moore at UCL on 020 7679 7678  

Notes for editors

1. The Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP) provides a focus for development, understanding and application of methods for modelling individual behaviour, the influences on it and the impact of policy interventions.
   The Centre was initially funded in 2001 by the Leverhulme Trust, and has established itself as a Centre of excellence for research into microdata methods and practice and as a focus for teaching and training. More information can be found on the Centre’s website at http://cemmap.ifs.org.uk
2. The ESRC is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It provides independent, high quality, relevant research to business, the public sector and Government. The ESRC total expenditure in 2005/6 is £135million. At any time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and research policy institutes. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk 
3. ESRC Society Today offers free access to a broad range of social science research and presents it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and saves users valuable time. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research (formerly accessible via the Regard website) and key online resources such as the Social Science Information Gateway and the UK Data Archive, non-ESRC resources are included, for example the Office for National Statistics. The portal provides access to early findings and research summaries, as well as full texts and original datasets through integrated search facilities. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk 
4. The Institute for Fiscal Studies is an independent research organisation, which aims to promote effective economic and social policies through rigorous analysis of their impact on individuals, families, firms and the public finances.
5. About UCL: Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. In the government's most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 59 UCL departments achieved top ratings of 5* and 5, indicating research quality of international excellence. 
   UCL is the fourth-ranked UK university in the 2005 league table of the top 500 world universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. UCL alumni include Mahatma Gandhi (Laws 1889, Indian political and spiritual leader); Jonathan Dimbleby (Philosophy 1969, writer and television presenter); Junichiro Koizumi (Economics 1969, Prime Minister of Japan); Lord Woolf (Laws 1954 - Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales), Alexander Graham Bell (Phonetics 1860s - inventor of the telephone), and members of the band Coldplay.