Links: 23rd July. Special Focus: Emigration.

1. Adam Jaffe: Building Program Evaluation Into The Design Of Public Research Support Programs

2. NSF Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development

3. Greg Mankiw discusses the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers' "impossible job": measuring how many jobs were created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Here's a link to the CEA document.

4. Marginal Revolution flags a recent paper by Weber and Castillo from Yahoo! Research: The Demographics of Web Search. "How does the web search behavior of 'rich' and 'poor' people differ? Do men and women tend to click on different results for the same query?"

5. David McWilliams on emigration out of Ireland: "The ESRI predicts that 120,000 will leave the country in the next 18 months, on top of the 100,000 who have already gone in the past 18 months."

6. It was last year that the CSO reported that for the first time since 1995 more people left Ireland than moved here. That is, there was net outward migration.

7. Overall, the ESRI commentary warns that 200,000 people may be forced to emigrate between now and 2015 if unemployment does not abate.

8. In addition, a new Eurobarometer survey shows more than one fifth of Irish people are thinking of moving abroad for work. It also shows that 35% of Irish people feel employment prospects are better in other countries.

9. This Irish Times article states that current statistics show "Irish people are moving to both Canada and Australia in increasing numbers to escape the economic recession but are largely shunning traditional emigration routes to Britain and the US."

10. A companion article by the same journalist (Jamie Smyth) considers whether time abroad could end up as permanent emigration: "...if the Irish economy does not rebound in the next few years and create job opportunities for the next generation of graduates and school-leavers it seems very likely that a year spent working abroad will lead to longer term and more permanent emigration." To quote an old Pogues song, (hundreds of) thousands are "sailing".