Luxembourg Income Study

This application seeks continued financial support from the ESRC for LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study), a cross-national data archive and research institute. LIS is a data infrastructure of income and wealth data whose primary purpose is to enable cross-national, interdisciplinary primary research into socio-economic outcomes and their determinants. Whilst LIS is physically located in Luxembourg, users of the LIS microdata come from 70 countries including the UK.

The work of acquiring, harmonising and documenting diverse datasets from multiple countries is labour intensive, requiring 10 or more full-time staff. In order to avoid having to charge individual user fees, LIS is seeking financial support to be able to continue providing researchers with access to high-quality data. This application seeks support from ESRC to help cover LIS' basic operating costs, which primarily consists of staff salaries and computer equipment.

LIS, the institution, houses two databases - the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS). LIS datasets include income, employment, and demographic variables at the person- and household-level. Since its founding, LIS datasets have been used by 4,300 researchers from around the world to analyse economic and social policies and their effects on outcomes including poverty, income inequality, employment status, wage patterns, gender inequality, family formation - and when combined with other datasets - child-wellbeing, health status, immigration, political behavior and public opinion. The newer LWS datasets enable research on wealth portfolios, asset levels, and the interplay between household income and wealth.

The microdata contained in LIS and LWS are not accessible directly for reasons of confidentiality, and cannot be removed from the LIS office in Luxembourg. Therefore, only registered users may query the microdata via email to the remote-execution system, LISSY, a system-specific job submission interface. The users send programs and receive statistical summaries as the end product of their request.

LIS is a unique resource, whose primary function is to facilitate research by providing controlled public access to household data. LIS is the only data archive in existence that includes income, wealth and labour market data, over time and in one place from such diverse geographic regions and at such varied income levels. LIS also provides a high level of user support and hands-on assistance to LIS and LWS researchers - through its online learning materials, user-support staff, and training workshops. LIS has also long operated as a venue for researchers and practitioners to exchange research ideas, results, and methods. These exchanges take place through the widely accessed Working Paper Series, the Visiting Scholar program, pre- and postdoctoral postings, annual workshops, conferences, and virtual venues.

The participating countries are high-income and middle-income countries. LIS will continue to grow to include many more middle-income countries' datasets, enabling greater comparative opportunities in income, demographic, and labour market research. Additionally, LWS will continue to develop and grow, adding more countries and years, and thus facilitating new and expanded lines of research related to wealth.

The UK was one of the initial participants in both LIS and LWS. Individuals and organisations in the UK have been actively engaged with LIS for three decades, providing data, contributing financing and serving as board members. Since LIS' inception, researchers in the UK have queried the microdata; produced publications, government reports and working papers using the LIS data; attended summer workshops; participated in the Visiting Scholar program; contributed to research conferences and conference volumes; and provided invaluable intellectual guidance and direction regarding LIS' activities and products (names available upon request).

The funds sought in this proposal will contribute directly to enhancing the impact of LIS. Excellent research depends on high-quality data, and LIS provides high-quality data to researchers around the world. LIS depends on core contributions from participating countries, such as the UK, to fund data harmonisation, metadata preparation, and key IT infrastructure allowing data queries. LIS' essential contribution to researchers is to take over the time- and labour-intensive task of harmonising and documenting multiple datasets for cross-national research.

LIS cross-national data are important in academia, supranational organizations, journalism and the "Third Sector." The data have the potential to inform government policies at all levels in areas such as tax policy, educational policy, family leave benefits, and the like. The LIS and LWS Databases are significant resources for researches in many disciplines such as sociology, economics, political science, public policy, demography and public health, who are studying social and economic outcomes of public policies across high- and middle-income countries.

LIS requests that all work using the databases be submitted as a working paper; the LIS, LWS and Technical Working Papers Series search engine on the website is accessible in full to the general public. Working papers do not preclude later publication in a peer-reviewed venue, in fact many papers are subsequently submitted for publication in academic journals, books and doctoral dissertations. There are nearly 600 papers available to date. LIS also produces "Key Figures," which are national indicators on poverty and inequality that are available to all visitors to the website (www.lisdatacenter.org). LIS holds annual summer workshops, maintains a funded Visiting Scholars program, sponsors annual award stipends for outstanding research using the LIS and LWS Databases, sponsors periodic conferences and an annual, public, economics lecture series, and promotes its events through social media and various professional association listservs (e.g., European Sociological Association, International Sociological Association, European Economic Association, International Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, European Society for Population Economics, etc.).

LIS actively engages in collaborations and intellectual exchanges with supranational agencies such as the OECD, UNICEF, and the World Bank, as well as with organisations doing similar work such as the EUROMOD project at the University of Essex, and IPUMS International at the University of Minnesota. The directors are regularly sought by journalists and government officials at all levels for commentary, as are individual researches whose scholarship is based on the LIS data. Commercial access to the microdata is prohibited by many of the countries that contribute datasets to LIS.

LIS measures its impact in a number of ways, including query submission rates through the remote-execution system LISSY, working papers accumulation, the number of new and repeat registrants to the microdata, Google Analytics, and periodic assessments of print and digital media mentions. The staff collects participant evaluations at the end of each summer workshop, requests input from board members to set organisational priorities, and submits strategic plans and progress reports to funders.