Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research
Substantial institutional differentials within a relatively small distance and their impact on cross-border activities like firm location, household mobility, monetary flows, and the like are generating an abundance of research topics, which are of relevance for a better understanding of the mechanisms of economic and social convergence or divergence.
LISER contributes to the advancement of scientific knowledge in social and economic matters across the activities of its three research departments "Living Conditions", "Labour Market" and "Urban Development and Mobility".
The main mission of the department is to produce research that is both excellent and impactful, and more specifically, to analyse the effects of public policies and societal changes on employment and on the workplace.
The department is inter and multidisciplinary in nature and characterised by recognised international, scientific and academic expertise in measurement issues (e.g. inequality, equality of opportunity, social monitoring) and ex-ante (microsimulation) and ex-post policy evaluation.
The impact evaluation of socio-fiscal, family, educational, health, pension and wider social policy on living conditions is an integral part of the department research agenda.
The UDM Department contributes also to the three inter-disciplinary research programmes: With the free movement of individuals within the EU, political instability and global inequality, more and more people have been crossing borders in recent decades, either as refugees, regular migrants or as daily transnational commuters.
These cross-border movements generate important challenges for EU countries, and has particularly strong implications for its labour market, public finances, social cohesion and regional governance around border areas.
The Research Programme on Crossing Borders has specific objectives: (i) Assess the size and structure of historical and recent cross-border flows, and understand their root drivers.
(v) Develop tools to help policy decision-makers to maximise the gains and/or minimise the cost of current and future movements for European countries in general, and for the Luxembourg society in particular.
LISER will contribute to this objective by developing high quality, multidisciplinary research on a broad range of topics, including: (i) Socio-economic and spatial inequalities in the health of individuals and populations.
(v) The rigorous evaluation - in terms of effectiveness as well as (where feasible) 'value for money' - of policies that may directly or indirectly influence these determinants, and; (vi) The assessment of health system performance.
The implications of the digital transformation will inevitably go beyond labour markets and will have direct and indirect impact for our social welfare systems as well as our ways of conceiving the next generations' education and training.
The programme heavily exploits analytics, quantitative modeling and computer science to tackle practical problems arising from different domains ranging from finance to education, passing through health care, transportation, telecommunications, and personalised medicine.
Digital Transformations covers the following broad research areas: LISER has traditionally had a predominant position in Luxembourg with respect to the face-to face survey component.
The University Consortium and to guarantee the academic standards of the programme, CEPS/INSTEAD had made a joint venture agreement with the Department of Sociology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as key partner and offers an International Master in Social Policy Analysis (IMPALLA).
