About IFAU

The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU) is a state-owned research institute.

We do research on questions related to the labour market, education and social security. IFAU specialises in quantitative effect studies based on register data. IFAU’s scientific council awards research grants in November each year.

Our objective is to create the best possible knowledge basis for the politics which directly or indirectly concerns our research areas. This is done both through direct evaluations of individual efforts and by studying the broader context and the conditions for developing those areas that are covered by IFAU’s assignments. We also work at method development.

IFAU wants to contribute new and valuable knowledge. Most of our research projects are initiated by ourselves and are chosen based on state of knowledge, evaluability and the importance of the question. Sometimes we also get government assignments.

IFAU publishes reports in Swedish and working papers in English. 

Reports in Swedish can either be a summary of a working paper or an independent product. There is both an internal and an external review before publication. Each report and each working paper is scrutinized by an external and an internal researcher as well as an editor. Each research report must also be presented at a seminar on at least one occasion.

Our working papers must have a scientific level corresponding to that of the international research community. As a rule, each working paper is submitted to a scientific journal. Scientific publications are used as part of our quality assurance and does also contribute to the diffusion of the results.

We also have a so-called dissertation series where those graduate students that are affiliated with the government authority publish their dissertations.

IFAU does not make any proposals or recommendations in its reports.

There is a scientific council consisting of researchers from several different fields which assists us in our work. We have a reference group that consists of labour market parties, a number of other government authorities that work within our research areas as well as representatives from the Swedish Government Offices.

IFAU was established in 1997 and is located in Uppsala.