IER News & blogs

The University of Warwick is recruiting to make two appointments in the Institute for Employment Research at either Professorial or Principal Research Fellow level. Candidates with interests in any of the Institute's diverse fields of research are encouraged to apply. Details can be found on the HR website.

The closing date for application is Thursday 27 June 2013.

Peter Elias will be presenting a session entitled "Big data and the Social Sciences – what’s going on?" at the Public Economics UK conference being held at the University of Warwick on 18th - 19th June 2013. The conference is designed to help the ESRC to identify some priority research areas for their future data funding opportunities. The timetable and registration details are available from http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/events/conferences/peuk/

IER and Cambridge Econometrics are currently undertaking a review of the literature looking at seven key methodological issues in estimating returns to Higher Education, Further Education and Skills. The project is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As a part of the project, a one day workshop is being hosted at the University of Warwick and is being chaired by Prof Peter Elias (IER). A number of academics will come together to hear findings from the review and to discuss their views and experiences of these issues. The aim of the study and the workshop is to set forth recommendations for BIS (and others) to utilise in future analysis so that the estimated economic value added of different forms of learning are robust and representative of the true underlying returns.

The fourth Demography Forum, taking place on 6-7 May in Brussels, will focus on investing for Europe’s demographic future.

IER's Bernard Casey will act as Rapporteur on age and employment for the sesssion entitled "Enable people to be active longer".

Findings from Stage 4 of the HECSU-funded Futuretrack study are highlighted in a special issue of Graduate Market Trends (GMT), published by HECSU (February 2013). An IER research team, led by Professor Kate Purcell, followed the progression of the 2005/2006 cohort of applicants to higher education from application to graduation. Data from the Futuretrack study has raised important questions about the types of employment obtained by graduates, finances, career opportunities and further study.

http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/current_projects_graduate_market_trends.htm

Further details about the research can be found on the IER website at: www.warwick.ac.uk/futuretrack , where PDFs of the project’s published Reports and Working Papers can be accessed and downloaded, as can PDFs of the online questionnaires used for each stage of the longitudinal research.

Professor Purcell notes: "This is the most ambitious and comprehensive research ever undertaken to explore the relationship between higher education and access to opportunity. The data we have collected is extraordinarily rich, the published reports produced so far only show the tip of the iceberg . There is much more to come..!”