Luxembourg Income Study 2020

This application seeks continued financial support from the ESRC for LIS, 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 about 100 countries including the UK. The work of acquiring and harmonising diverse datasets from multiple countries is labour intensive; by centralising this task, LIS saves time for researchers carrying out comparative analyses, avoiding the repetition of these tasks every time a scholar starts a project; in addition, thanks to its expertise over many years, LIS can ensure users the best comparability of the data. 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 contains the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, which includes income data, and the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, which focuses on wealth data. Since its founding, LIS datasets have been used by 8,000 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, child-wellbeing, health status, immigration, political behaviour and public opinion. The newer LWS datasets enable research on wealth portfolios, asset levels, and the interplay between household income and wealth. According to the Publish and Perish software that retrieves and analyses academic citations, the Hirsch's h-index is above 160 for LIS and 55 for LWS.

LIS is a unique resource not only with respect to the breath of its data offering (it is the only data archive in existence that includes income, wealth and labour market microdata, over time and in one place from such diverse geographic regions and at such varied income levels), but also because it is the only archive providing access to confidential microdata through a secure remote execution system, that allows thousands of registered users all over the world to receive the logs of their statistical queries in real time (an average of about 70,000 requests are processed every year). 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 (now including 840 papers), the Visiting Scholar program, pre- and postdoctoral postings, annual workshops and conferences.
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 research opportunities. Additionally, it is now seeking to expand its data offerings in terms of increased frequency of data availability, and improved tools for data access and meta data.

The UK has always had an important role in LIS since its very inception in the 1980s, when British economist Tony Atkinson gave a fundamental contribution to its construction and development (he later become the president of its Board). Individuals and organisations in the UK have been actively engaged with LIS for over three decades, providing data, contributing financing and serving as board members. 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' activit

LIS contributions to the social sciences are aimed at narrowing the gap between research and practice, and strengthening public policy-making. LIS is committed to facilitating maximum availability to the most scientifically sound data available. The international infrastructure of the social sciences has been strengthened by LIS. In addition to research and policy uses, LIS is an innovator in its cross-national financing, its thorough documentation system, its summer workshops, and other educational outreach activities.

By allowing LIS to continue expanding along the directions set out above, 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, key IT infrastructure allowing data queries, as well as the right research-promoting activities. LIS' essential contribution to researchers is to take over the time- and labour-intensive tasks of harmonising and documenting multiple datasets for cross-national research.

LIS cross-national data are important in academia, supranational organizations, journalism and the non-profit 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 in its Working Papers Series; the LIS 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 840 papers available to date. LIS also produces a quarterly newsletter aimed at promoting cross-national research and showcasing the use of LIS and LWS data. Alongside its widespread LIS Key Figures, a new series of national-level indicators on poverty and inequality will soon become available through a powerful web-based tool (DART); this tool will foster social science research considerably, by expanding access to knowledge for those within academic settings world-wide, as well as those around the globe who are outside academic settings. 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.

LIS' network is augmented by a number of high profile Senior Scholars who are regularly sought by journalists and government officials for analysis and commentary based on their LIS work. LIS actively engages in collaborations and intellectual exchanges with supranational agencies such as the OECD, various UN agencies, the World Bank, as well as with organisations doing similar work such as the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and the World Inequality Lab (WIL).
LIS measures its impact in a number of ways, including query submission rates through the remote-execution system LISSY, working papers accumulation, number of downloads from RePEC (Research Papers in Economics), the number of new and repeat registrants to the microdata, Google Analytics, the Hirsch's h-index from the Publish and Perish software that retrieves and analyses academic citations, and periodic assessments of print and digital media mentions.