IRC Irish Research Funding 2018 Indicative Call Schedule

See this link for the 2018 indicative call schedule for research funding of the main research funding body in Ireland. This includes calls for PhD studentships, postdoctoral fellowships, industry/policy collaborations, and principal investigator led research funding. I am happy to discuss collaboration or hosting in the broad areas of interest in our research group across these funding areas.

IRC Employment Based PhD Programme

See below and this website for details of the forthcoming IRC employment based PhD initiative. I would be very happy to speak to people interested in working with our group on a proposal, including current partners.

Background

The Employment-Based Postgraduate Programme is a unique national initiative. First piloted in 2012, it provides students in all disciplines an opportunity to work in a co-educational environment involving a higher education institution and an employment partner.

What is an employment partner?

An eligible Employment Partner on this programme is a business, company, registered charity, social, cultural or not-for-profit organisation, or a commercial semi-state organisation with a physical operational base located in Ireland that will employ the scholar for the duration of the award.

An eligible employment partner must have a base in the Republic of Ireland which can host the researcher.
The employment partner commits a minimum contribution of €8,000 p.a. towards the salary of the researcher.
The employment partner must be in a position to facilitate research and to provide mentorship to the researcher.

Thinking about applying?

Please note that, for reasons of transparency and fairness for all applicants, the Council will not enter into email, written or telephone correspondence with any individual applicant about the assessment process or their eligibility to apply.

Applicants should review all available documentation on our website, in particular the Terms and Conditions, in order to answer any queries they may have.

If you do not find the answer to your query in the available documentation, you should contact the research office (i.e. the office of the Vice-President/Dean of Research/Head of Development, as applicable) in your proposed institution. The research office will be able to provide information and clarification on the call. Research offices may send any queries they are unable to clarify to schemes@research.ie with the subject ‘Employment-Based Programme 2017 FAQ’. A set of FAQs will then be posted on this webpage.

How to apply

Applications will only be accepted through the online application system. As an aid to preparing an application, an indicative Word document version of the application form is provided as part of the call documentation. Indicative academic supervisor, employment mentor and referee forms are also provided. All applicants, supervisors and referees must submit their applications through the online application system according to the deadlines below.

2017 Update #ucdbsp

Just a brief note of thanks for all the interactions in the first year of our new programme in Dublin. Our twitter feed and hashtag #ucdbsp gives a sense of the activity over the year. We have now got a very solid research team in UCD. We also funded our first major projects in this area, including the award of a highly competitive Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship to Michael Daly this year to join our group, and an EPA fellowship to Leonhard Lades to work with EnvEcon and our group on a collaborative project. We are glad also to welcome Till Weber as a research fellow and Sean Gill, Tadgh Heggarty, and Kenneth Devine, as PhD students. Doireann O'Brien, Aisling Reidy, Sarah Breathnach, Lucie Martin, Karen Arulsamy, Roland Umanan, Philip Carthy, Pierce Gately, Dara Lavelle, all worked on many different aspects of the development of our projects as paid student research assistants, and it is particularly good to develop this aspect and I hope the group will become a training ground for top researchers of the future.

This year we held many events internally and externally, including with some of the leading thinkers in this area globally, including several sessions of our behavioural science and policy network, which now has over 400 members on the mailing list. See this link for the preliminary list of Wednesday sessions for next term and I will add more shortly. These sessions have been very useful in connecting the research group and students to the wider world and I hope it will be an engine room for the development of this area in Ireland more generally. We also hosted the 10th annual workshop in economics and psychology in Ireland on December 1st, with keynote speakers Professors Don Ross and Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington. We also hosted a workshop for PhD students and early career researchers in behavioural science on November 30th, and we will host this event again in 2018. We formally launched our centre in September with a keynote talk from Professor Peter John. We were also glad to host Professor Cass Sunstein on two occasions, including the award of the UCD Ulyssses medal to him and Professor Samantha Power.

We have worked on projects with the Environmental Protection Agency, Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, Beaumont Hospital, Amarach Research, EnvEcon, Department of Health, and others and these will develop further throughout 2018.  Our new MSc in Behavioural Economics began in September with a very strong group of students and it is recruiting solidly for 2018/2019 also, and was made possible by industry funding to UCD from AIB. We also opened up the undergraduate module to a wide group of students, and 230 students registered and took this course at UCD this term. Publications from our team in 2017 included several peer-reviewed articles in international journals in economics, psychology, and health, including Psychological Science, Economic Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Economics Letters, Journal of Behavioural Decision Making, Health Psychology, European Journal of Political Economy, and others. Many of these papers are based on projects that were developed before the current initiative but much of this work will be continued here in various forms.

In 2018, we will roll out new modules in behavioural public policy and experimental behavioural economics. We will also have a full programme of external events, details of which will be made available shortly, including monthly sessions of the Irish behavioural science and policy network. We are also in the process of building a physical experimental laboratory space in Dublin and I look forward to talking to people more about that. We will also make preparations for hosting the 44th annual IAREP conference in Dublin in September. 2019. We look forward to developing a stream of interesting projects across environmental policy, health, and financial decision making, with particular emphasis on measurement foundations, evaluation methods, and ethics. I hope the team will build up well during the year and we already have some interesting things to announce relatively early in the New Year. We will also put up a full website toward the middle of the next academic term.

Wednesday Weekly Sessions

We host a weekly session from 930am to 1030am on Wednesday mornings to bring our researchers and students together with external stakeholders interested in this area. As well as knowledge exchange, we also hope that students will be encouraged to apply some of their material to direct policy questions. Below is current schedule. We welcome expressions of interest.

Spring 2018 

24th January: Anamaria Vrabie (The New School): "Behavioural Economics and Urban Design". 

31st January: Cliona Kelly (UCD) "Behavioural Law and Economics". 

7th February: Derville Rowland, Director General, Financial Conduct at the Central Bank. 

14th February: Aisling Ní Chonaire: Lead Research Advisor, Behavioural Insights Team. 

21st February: Faisal Naru (OECD): "Behavioural Economics and Public Policy". 

28th February: Doris Laepple (NUIG): "Behavioural Experiments in Agricultural Economics". 

7th March: Cal Muckley (UCD): "National culture and banking operational risk".

4th April: Ben Elsner (UCD/IZA): "Rank and Peer Effects in Education". 

11th April: Paul Adams (FCA): "Behavioural Economics at the Financial Conduct Authority". 

18th April: Deirdre Robertson (ESRI): "Behavioural Economics and Regulation".

Autumn 2017 

27th September: Simon Rafferty (EPA) "Behavioural Economics and Environmental Policy" and Patricia Harris (HSA): "Reducing Work Accidents in Ireland"

4th October: Clare Delargy (BIT): "Behavioural Insights Team and Public Policy".

11th October: Aine Lyng and Ronan Murphy (NCCP): "Cancer Prevention"

18th October: Cathal Fitzgerald (DETI): "Brexit and Firm Decision Making; Behavioural Economics of Innovation".

25th October: Till Weber (Nottingham): "Experimental Methods and Behavioural Economics".

1st November: Leonhard Lades (UCD and EnvEcon): "Naturalistic Monitoring of Human Preferences and Behaviour".

8th November: Michael Daly (UCD and Stirling): "Self-control and Health".

15 November: Orla Doyle (UCD): "Behavioural Economics and Early Childhood Intervention".

22nd November: Kenneth Devine (Central Bank of Ireland): "Behavioural Economics and Financial Decision Making".

29th November: Keith Walsh (Revenue): "Behavioural Economics and Tax Administration".

Richard Thaler Nobel Lecture

See below for Richard Thaler's Nobel speech. Congratulations to Prof Thaler and thanks to him for his intellectual leadership over the last decades.

Economics and Qualitative Research

Economics is mostly a quantitative discipline from the basic undergraduate principles courses to the most recent editions of the top journals. The extent to which economics students should be exposed to qualitative research methods is being debated in various ways in the UK, particularly in the context of the ESRC postgraduate training guidelines, that stipulate that all ESRC-funded postgraduates should receive training in both quantitative and qualitative research methods.

There a plethora of cultural, philosophical, and practical barriers to integrating such methodologies into mainstream economics. Many economists will object that the strength of economics has been the ability to generate testable predictions from rigorous mathematical theoretical models. Others might simply point to the expectations of students arriving onto graduate Economics programme that they will be provided with the most rigorous quantitative tools to perform modern economic analysis. Having said that, Economists are increasingly become involved in real-world field trials, where an element of qualitative research is necessary to understand the process and potentially also the mechanism of the interventions and policies being tested. Professional economists in this context will increasingly be required to understand, at least, how to intelligently consume such information.

There have also been some strong precedents for the use of qualitative research methods in Economics. Truman Bewley's famous work on why wages don't fall during a recession is one example of a well-regarded Economics work that came from structured interviews with business decision makers. More generally, the potential for qualitative research to provide greater understanding of the nature of various types of economic phenomena needs to be discussed in greater depth.

Thanks to Jeff Round (@unhealthyecon on twitter) for recommending the recently released "Qualitative Methods for Health Economics".

I will use this post to keep track of some useful references on qualitative research in Economics. Suggestions and comments welcome.

The review paper below provides a useful overview of qualitative and mixed methodological designs that might be useful in Economics.

Starr (2014). Qualitative and mixed-methods research in economics: surprising growth, promising future. Journal of Economic Surveys, Volume 28, Issue 2,  Pages 238–264.

Qualitative research in economics has traditionally been unimportant compared to quantitative work. Yet there has been a small explosion in use of quantitative approaches in the past 10–15 years, including ‘mixed-methods’ projects which usequalitative and quantitative methods in combination. This paper surveys the growing use of qualitative methods in economics and closely related fields, aiming to provide economists with a useful roadmap through major sets of qualitativemethods and how and why they are used. We review the growing body of economic research using qualitative approaches, emphasizing the gains from using qualitative- or mixed-methods over traditional ‘closed-ended’ approaches. It is argued that, although qualitative methods are often portrayed as less reliable, less accurate, less powerful and/or less credible than quantitative methods, in fact, the two sets of methods have their own strengths, and how much can be learned from one type of method or the other depends on specific issues that arise in studying the topic of interest. The central message of the paper is that well-done qualitative work can provide scientifically valuable and intellectually helpful ways of adding to the stock of economic knowledge, especially when applied to research questions for which they are well suited.

The chapter "Does Qualitative Research fit in Economics?" is also worth reading.