Impact

Our academic impact

Hosting one of the UK’s only two prestigious UKRI-funded social science Research Institutes, IFS economists carry out cutting-edge empirical research on a par with our leading universities.

IFS Research Director Imran Rasul was elected as the next Vice-President of the European Economic Association, IFS International Research Fellow Olympia Bover was awarded the Rei Jaume I Prize and IFS Associate Director Anne Brockmeyer was awarded the 2023 ADB-IEA Innovative Policy Research Award for one of her papers.

IFS authors published 82 journal articles and 72 working papers in 2023. Over the past decade we have had 48 articles in the top five economics journals.

Our policy impact

Our research and expertise is drawn upon by national, regional and local policymakers in the UK and overseas, as well as MPs from all parties. We publish high quality, policy-relevant research:

• In 2023, IFS was mentioned 206 times in parliamentary debates. (Source: Hansard).
• IFS and IFS research was mentioned 352 times in UK government documents
• Our annual flagship Green Budget report, setting out options and challenges for the Chancellor, was launched over a series of events and video streams. In total, over 700 people watched at least one of these events live.

“When I worked in the Treasury, we knew the IFS would keep us honest...and we knew that having an independent check on our costings and analysis was an excellent discipline.”

Lord Gus O’Donnell, former Cabinet Minister and IFS President

Our impact on society

We inform public and policy debates on issues such as education, health, inequality and the public finances. We significantly increased engagement and reach in 2023.

• Our primary social media channel is Twitter, where we have over 59,200 followers, demonstrating year-on-year growth of 5.3% in 2023. 
• In 2023, our website traffic continued to grow, resulting in over 2.1 million website visits, a 8.2% increase on 2022.
• We had over 1.4 million video views across all platforms in 2023, tripling when compared to 2022.
• We held 43 events in 2023, attended by 6,702 people from media, policy, business, third sector and the general public. Our event videos from last year have been watched over 28,000 times on YouTube.

Our media impact

IFS staff regularly engage with journalists from print, online and broadcast media. Our research, analysis and reactive commentary earned us over 35,707 UK media mentions in 2023. We also published 107 press releases, an increase of 7% on 2022. 

“The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ genuine impartiality has become a major asset in scrutinising claims and counter claims.”

Heather Stewart, The Guardian