Lorenzo Cappellari
Visiting Research Fellow
lorenzo.cappellari@unicatt.it

Lorenzo is currently associate professor of economics, Facoltà di Economia, Università Cattolica, Milano. His research interests are labour economics, income distribution and dynamics, economics of education, and microeconometrics

Read Lorenzo's full CV [pdf]

Sue Clegg
Visiting Research Fellow
sclegg@tiscali.co.uk

Sue Clegg has almost 20 years' experience in research. She specialises in qualitative research and has worked both in academia and in an agency; she has managed projects in the UK and across Europe. Sue's expertise is in health and well-being, including: food choices; experience of services; living with health problems and disabilities; and the perspectives of professionals. Recent work includes work for the Food Standards Agency, exploring people's use and understanding of front-of-pack nutrition information labels, a process evaluation of a calorie-information scheme, an evaluation of pilot childcare programmes for DfE (then DfES), DWP and the Welsh Assembly, and an investigation of the medical information needs of health professionals.

Sue has also lectured in sociology, specialising in research methods, and has delivered training on researching sensitive issues.

Nick Coleman
Visiting Research Fellow

Nick Coleman has been working as an independent research consultant since July 2007, providing expertise in survey and sample design, project management, analysis and reporting.

Recent projects include advice to BERR and other WERS sponsors on the design of the 6th Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS), and to the General Teaching Council on the design of the 2009 Annual Teachers Survey. He has also worked as part of the research team on a major survey of children’s services providers, with BMRB on behalf of DCSF, with specific responsibility for the sample design. Current projects include the evaluation of Lone Parent Obligations, in which he has responsibility for the quantitative research, working with Inclusion and NatCen for DWP. He has also carried out the analysis and reporting for a number of recent projects, for government departments including DWP, DCSF and the Home Office.

He previously worked at BMRB and MORI, and during this time managed a range of major quantitative studies for central government departments. These included large-scale evaluation studies for DWP; other major DWP studies of benefit customers, employer surveys, and surveys of adult skills and learning.

Rosemary Davidson
Research Fellow
r.davidson@psi.org.uk

Rosemary joined PSI’s Work and Social Policy group in June 2009 as a qualitative research fellow. She is a social psychologist undertaking research in social status, resilience and group processes, previously working at University College London’s department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology and before that at London School of Economics (Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion).

She was awarded a PhD investigating the role of psycho-social mechanisms in the generation of health inequalities in 2003 from the Medical Research Council’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit.

Augustin De Coulon
Visiting Research Fellow
augustin.decoulon@kcl.ac.uk

Augustin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management at the School of Social Science and Public Policy, Kings College, London. His interests include the labour market assimilation of migrants, the economics of education (basic skills and vocational training) and health economics (risky behaviours).

Francesca Francavilla
Research Fellow
f.francavilla@psi.org.uk

Francesca joined the PSI Employment research group in January 2008 as a Research Fellow. Prior to joining PSI, she worked as Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Florence (Italy), where she previously obtained a PhD in Development Economics.

She is a quantitative researcher specialising in labour market economics with econometric and data handling skills using both administrative data and survey data. Her main research interests include Programme valuation, Welfare-to-work, Child labour, and Poverty reduction.

Her most recent research involved the analysis of the relationship between mother and child labour and the causal relationship between poverty and fertility in less developed countries. She worked as a consultant to UNICEF, WHO and the Understanding Children's Work project (ILO, UNICEF and the World Bank inter-agency research project).

At PSI Francesca is working on the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) programme, for the Department for Work and Pensions and on the Understanding the housing and economic circumstances of The Riverside Group tenants project, for The Riverside Group.

She is also working on a project for the European Parliament on the evaluation of the value of Unpaid Family Care Work in the EU.

Gianna Giannelli
Visiting Research Fellow

Gianna is Associate Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Law of the University of Florence. She is also associate researcher of CHILD (Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics, Turin) and research fellow of IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn). She is member of the scientific committee of the Italian Association of Labour Economists (AIEL).

Her current research interests concern the labour market of developing countries and the effects of labour market reforms on the duration of employment and unemployment in Europe.

Read Gianna's full CV here.

Lesley Hoggart
Visiting Research Fellow
L.Hoggart@greenwich.ac.uk

Lesley is currently Principal Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Care, University of Greenwich, and was previously Senior Research Fellow, Work and Social Policy Group at PSI.

Fatima Husain
Senior Research Fellow
f.husain@psi.org.uk

Fatima joined PSI in November 2009 as a Senior Research Fellow. Fatima has over 12 years of UK-based policy research experience and has previously worked at the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, Save the Children UK, the Family and Parenting Institute and the University of North London (London Met.)

She has extensive experience of designing and managing qualitative research projects and qualitative components of programme and service evaluations utilising a range of methods including focus groups, stakeholder consultations, and in-depth interviews. She also has experience of facilitating consultation workshops to develop programme models using Theory of Change approaches.

Genevieve Knight
Quantitative Group Manager
g.knight@psi.org.uk

Genevieve is an applied economist/econometrician, with a quantitative emphasis. Her main field of interest is evaluation of policy programs and the labour market. Her chief skills are with econometric modeling, and handling complex data. However, she also conducts cost-benefit analysis , and systematic literature and evidence reviews. She has previously specialised in macroeconometrics and time series at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, worked on various academic research projects, and undertaken microeconometric panel analysis of the cost of job loss with Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth at the Centre for Economic Performance LSE. She is a graduate of the University of Sydney, Australia, had an Overseas Research Studentship, with the London School of Economics, and completed her doctoral thesis on the topic Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy: Special Youth Employment and Training Program, SYETP.

At PSI, she first worked on the DSS project 'Self-employment and pensions', with the Employment Service on the New Deal for Young People quantitative evaluation, as well as working on the New Deal for Scotland quantitative evaluation with the Scottish Executive, the Joint Claims evaluation, the Macro evaluation of NDYP, and benchmarking of NDYP for the NAO. Recent work has been with the DWP projects for the Joint Claims Extension working with the quantitative survey, and the administrative data analysis of Lone Parent Work Focused Interviews (Personal Adviser Meetings) using difference in differences. An interesting application of multiple treatment propensity score matching techniques was undertaken in the secondary analyses of NDLP and LPWFI, while hazard analysis was applied in analysing the In Work Benefit Calculation for lone parents. An extensive literature and methods review was undertaken to collect together methods and evidence for Evaluating the Working for Families policy project (New Zealand Ministry of Social Development).

She is leading the Evaluation of Childcare Taster Pilots and Extended Schools Childcare Pilot (DfES), and is part of the team for the In Work Credit and lone parent pilots evaluation, the Pathways to Work Incapacity Benefit Pilots Evaluation, and the Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration Evaluation, which are for the Department for Work and Pensions.

Mia Lorenz
Lecturer in Applied Social & Market Research Methods
post@mialorenz.net

Mia Lorenz is a key member of the MA/MSc Applied Market & Social Research/MRS Diploma Applied Market & Social Research team. She serves as module leader for three of the seven course modules: Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research Methods and Data Analysis and Research Practice and Assessment. She develops and delivers lectures in applied research methodology and ethics, supervises student dissertation projects and actively supports the continued development of the course.

Mia has an MA in Applied Social and Market Research from the University of Westminster, her dissertation winning the prestigious MRS Accredited Dissertation Prize. She is a Full Member of the MRS, as well as Member of the Social Research Association and the Higher Education Academy. She has many years experience of senior project management in the research and web services industries.

Geoffrey Meen
Visiting Research Fellow
g.p.meen@reading.ac.uk

Geoffrey Meen has over 20 years experience of working in housing economics and related fields. He is currently Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Reading and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a former Head of the Economics Department at Reading and Director of Research for the University’s Business School. Geoffrey is also currently UK Director of the International Centre for Housing and Urban Economics. He was awarded an OBE in the 2007 New Years Honours List for Services to Social Housing and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in the same year. He is also a Fellow of the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics, Florida.

His research interests are in applied econometrics, economic analysis of housing markets at different spatial levels from the national through to the local, and the economics of segregation and deprivation.

Stephen Morris
Principal Research Fellow
s.morris@psi.org.uk

Stephen joined PSI in 2008 having spent 12 years as a researcher in central government, holding posts at the Department of Social Security (DSS), Office for National Statistics (ONS), Prime Minister's Strategy Unit and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Prior to this, Stephen was a Research Officer at the Institute for Employment Studies.

The focus of Stephen's work has mainly been on large and complex policy evaluations, including the Prototype New Deal for Lone Parents and the design of the Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration, the largest randomised trial of welfare-to-work policies thus far conducted in the UK.  Stephen has also been responsible for several longitudinal studies of families with children, including the Programme of Research into Low Income Families (PRILIF) and the Families and Children Study (FACS).  He also worked in the DWP Model Development Unit, where he was responsible for demographic analysis and forecasting, specifically undertaking econometric estimation for the department's main dynamic micro-simulation model of pensioner incomes, PENSIM2.

In previous work, Stephen was responsible for drafting guidance on evaluation methods for government researchers and made a substantial contribution to the government's guidance on ex-post evaluation methods, the Magenta Book.  He also taught courses on evaluation methods and evidence-based policy at the National School for Government.  In 2006, Stephen completed a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), funded by the ESRC, where he conducted research into child support using micro-level longitudinal data.  Stephen is a member of the BHPS Scientific Advisory Committee and is a on the Editorial Board of <i>Benefits: The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice</i>, a tri-annual publication covering applied research into poverty and welfare.

Stephen's work at PSI currently includes Provider-Led Pathways impact evaluation and two feasibility studies for the DWP looking at methods of impact evaluation.  He teaches on the MA in Applied Market and Social Research offered through the Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages School at the University of Westminster.

Sergio Salis
Research Fellow
S.Salis@psi.org.uk

Sergio joined the PSI Employment research group in January 2008 as a Research Fellow. Prior to joining the PSI, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of European Transformations (ISET) of the London Metropolitan University and as a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari (Italy), where he previously obtained a PhD in Economics. His main research interests include development economics, labour economics, industrial relations and applied microeconomics.

Sergio is a quantitative researcher with over five years experience in handling micro-data. He has a long-standing interest in productivity-related issues and in the evaluation of policy interventions. His most recent research involved the evaluation of the causal effect of foreign acquisition on the productivity of Slovenian manufacturing firms and the evaluation of the causal effect of the Government’s Pathways to Work programme on Incapacity Benefits claimants in new expansion areas.

Deborah Smeaton
Senior Research Fellow
d.smeaton@psi.org.uk

Deborah joined PSI in 1999 and, as a mixed-methods researcher, has worked on a broad range of projects, using a variety of methodological approaches. She is experienced in:

• overall research design
• quantitative data analysis (cross sectional, panel, large and complex)
• survey design
• qualitative methods including case studies, focus groups and in-depth interviewing
• qualitative data analysis
• evaluation design and
• systematic literature reviewing/distillation.

Her research experience and publications span a variety of areas, with a focus on labour-market issues, including: entrepreneurship, older workers, change in the workplace, work and parenthood, maternity and paternity rights, discrimination, equalities, disadvantage, work-life balance, welfare to work and, more recently, food hygiene and nutrition-related research.

Deborah has managed projects for a wide variety of clients and agencies, including: DTI, DWP, HMRC, ESRC, JRF, EHRC, Nuffield, FSA England, FSA Northern Ireland, TUC, NESTA and the Big Lottery Fund.

Recent projects led and conducted by Deborah include: an evaluation of a Nutrition Award Scheme pilot for food businesses (for the Food Standards Agency in Northern Ireland), an evaluation of the impact on livelihood development of International Development grants on overseas communities (for the Big Lottery Fund); trends, causes and correlates of continuing to work beyond state pension age (for Eurofound) and a literature review of the costs and benefits to businesses of adopting work-life balance and flexible working policies and practices (for BIS).

Kim Vowden
Research Fellow
k.vowden@psi.org.uk

Kim joined PSI in June 2009 from the Institute of Education, where he recently completed a PhD on middle-class parents and social mix in London primary schools. Before retraining as a social researcher, he was a solicitor specialising in immigration and nationality law. He has also taught English as a foreign language and is a qualified primary-school teacher. At PSI, Kim specialises in qualitative research and is particularly interested in the areas of employment, education and migration.

Michael White
Emeritus Fellow
m.white@psi.org.uk

Michael White joined PSI in 1979 after working in industry and management research and teaching. In 1986 he founded the Employment Studies Group and was its Head until 1994.

His studies have included three national surveys of unemployment, and many evaluations of government labour market programmes, including the Restart Cohort Study, and the Macro evaluation of New Deal for Young People. He took part in the ESRC's Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (1986-91), was co-director of the Employment in Britain survey (1992), and was involved in the ESRC's "Future of Work" programme, leading the Working in Britain in the Year 2000 survey. He has also carried out several projects on lone mothers, employment and childcare issues and has a particular interest in working time and work-life balance.

He served on the Social Statistics Committee of the Royal Statistical Society 1998-2002, and on the Editorial Board of Work, Employment and Society 2006-2008.

In 2005 he was awarded an OBE for services to labour market policy.

Ralf Wilke
Visiting Research Fellow
ralf.wilke@york.ac.uk

Ralf Wilke is Reader in Microeconometrics at the University of York. His research interests are in the areas of Microeconometrics and Applied Econometrics. He has published in leading international journals such as Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Applied Econometrics and Regional Studies. Moreover, he has publications in the leading German journals. He has successfully completed externally funded research projects and is currently the principal investigator of an ESRC first grant. He is a research fellow of the ZEW Mannheim.

David Wilkinson
Visiting Research Fellow
d.wilkinson@niesr.ac.uk

David is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He was previously Principal Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute and before that worked at the Office for National Statistics and the London School of Economics. His work has focused on a range of topics in applied labour economics. His recent research has covered evaluation methodology with applications to welfare-to-work programmes; the impact of recent changes in student funding. Current research includes scoping work towards estimation of the take-up of Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance, and a quality measurement framework for pre-school education.