Stefan Speckesser
Dr. Stefan Speckesser is Principal Economist at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) in Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom. He is an empirical economist specializing in evaluation methodology and the impact of public policy and makes use of a wide range of experimental and non-experimental micro-econometric methods. Increasingly, this work also involves methods for the measurement of costs and benefits of social programs and the social returns to investments.
With a background in political science, his research initially focused on statistical methods to estimate the impact of public policies on aggregate employment outcomes. Following the increasing availability of internationally comparable micro-data in the late 1990's, Dr. Speckesser’s research extended to micro-econometric methods for the estimation of policy impacts, which was also the research topic of his doctoral dissertation in economics.
In more than nineteen years of research in academic departments in economics (Universities of Dresden, Mannheim, and Westminster) and political science (Free University of Berlin); and in international research centers (WZB Berlin, Policy Studies Institute London, and IES), Dr. Speckesser led or contributed to numerous empirical studies on European, British, German, and regional labor market policies and further topics in education economics and labor productivity. His projects include the impact of further education on wages (UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills), impact of the New Apprentice Rate of the National Minimum Wage (UK Low Pay Commission), the impact of high-performance workplace practices on organizational performance (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions) and the development of wages and productivity and the impact on national competitiveness in the European Union (European Commission). He has recently been an advisor to the Home Office (for its Economics and Resource Analysis Group) and the European Commission (as a thematic expert for the European Employment Observatory).
