Professor Alan Barrett

Professor Alan Barrett is Project Director with TILDA. He became Project Director in March 2011 and is on secondment from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). He is also a member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, having been appointed by the Minister for Finance for the period 2011 to 2014.

Alan is an economist by training. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1994 and joined the ESRI that year. His main research areas are labour economics and population economics. He has published in journals such as Labour Economics, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Journal of Population Economics, the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, the International Migration Review, Population Research and Policy Review, the Economic and Social Review, the National Institute Economic Review and Economics Letters.

Early in his career at the ESRI he undertook work on environmental economics. In 1997, he co-authored a book on environmental policy (The Fiscal System and the Polluter Pays Principle: A Case-study of Ireland, published by Ashgate). Between 2005 and 2010, he was a co-author of the Institute's Quarterly Economic Commentary. During this time, he was a frequent contributor to radio and television discussions on economic matters and was quoted in newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

Between 2001 and 2003, Alan spent two years in the Department of Finance as a Senior Economist. During this time, he worked on the long-term fiscal implications of population ageing. He is a Research Fellow with IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany. He is also an editor of the IZA Journal of European Labor Studies