Congratulations to LISER researchers Denisa M. Sologon  and Iryna Kyzyma who won the 2020 Miriam Herderman O’Brien Prize. Together with co-authors Cathal O'Donoghue (NUI Galway) and John McHale (NUI Galway) they were recognised by the Foundation for Fiscal Studies (Ireland) for their outstanding contribution made to understand the distributional implications of the COVID-19 crisis and the policy responses in Ireland.

The article “Modelling the Distributional Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis” (open access here), published in the Fiscal Studies, was innovative in developing a microsimulation-nowcasting approach using publicly available data to help understand and predict the income distribution implications of the COVID-19 emergency in “near-real” time.

Denisa and Iryna have also piloted this work also in Luxembourg forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Inequality (Working Paper access here).

The nature of the policy responses differed between Luxemburg and Ireland, as the capacity of these welfare systems to cushion consequences of COVID-19 largely depend on their design. Whereas Ireland introduced radically different policies from its existing system, Luxembourg introduced minor tweaks to the existing tax-benefit system, which already contained strong social insurance instruments that gave certainty during the crisis.

One of the key lessons is the resilience of the Luxembourgish system, its capacity to move swiftly by minor changes in exiting policy instruments able to cope with the shock.

“The timely analysis of the likely effects across the income distribution at the early stages in the Covid-19 emergency demonstrates the value of the Microsimulation-Nowcasting framework in modelling the impact of the emergency in “near-real” time. The model is a real-time analysis and decision support tool to monitor the recovery, with high applicability to policy makers. Models that can capture the complexities of real world systems, while swiftly incorporating the latest available data –whether epidemiological or economic –should be important aids for navigating through this devastating health, economic and social emergency.”

- Denisa M. Sologon

“We would like to acknowledge the innovations by public servants in developing the Pandemic Unemployment Payment and Wage Subsidies so quickly to protect people's incomes and to the transparency in which information was provided to the public. It made our work possible.”

- Iryna Kyzyma