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".

Youth Summer Employment Programmes

A continuing theme on this blog for the last three years has been the enormous empirical evidence demonstrating firstly that this recession is impacting young people disproportionately, that youth unemployment has substantial negative impacts outside of the basic first-round economic effects and that there is an urgent need to bump this issue up the policy agenda in Ireland. Policies that have been discussed include large-scale internship programmes, "kurzarbeit"policies that would encourage job sharing, enhanced job training programmes properly design and evaluated.

Mathematica Policy Research have been examining some of the programmes developed under the Recovery Act in the US. Linked here (thanks Mary Doyle from Geary for emailing this to me) is a document examining the development of major youth summer employment programmes financed under the act. Over 355 thousand people aged 14-24 took part in this particular programme. The evaluation is mostly at the level of implementation, reporting very high levels of satistfaction on both the side of employers and employees with the programme. One of the key metrics used, a measure of "work readiness" increased among participants. The evaluation itself suffers somewhat from the fact that this programme was rolled out very quickly to a "use or lose it" funding timescale and thus much of the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive. However, there is a huge amount of process information contained in this document that any Irish policymaker interested in attempting to address the youth labour market should examine. In particular, the potential efficacy of a programme like this for improving post-internship outcomes among recent graduates and unemployed school leavers should be examined.