Institutes & Think Tanks

Applied and policy research leans heavily on the methods where credibility is hardest to establish and easiest to attack. Causal inference is central—difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, and synthetic control—because the questions are almost always about what an intervention or a policy actually caused, and because the answers will be contested by people with an interest in a different conclusion. Economic modelling and simulation matter too, from input-output and CGE models for economy-wide impact to microsimulation for distributional effects, whenever the question is about what would happen under a policy that has not yet been tried.

Evidence synthesis is the other pillar. Systematic reviews, meta-analysis, and bibliometric mapping let an institute consolidate what is known on a question into something authoritative rather than anecdotal—increasingly the expected foundation for a serious policy contribution. We bring specialists in all of these, and we apply them with the documentation and reproducibility that applied work needs precisely because it will be scrutinized: when a finding is challenged, being able to show exactly how it was produced is what allows it to hold.

For a purely academic study, reproducibility is a matter of scientific integrity. For applied and policy research, it is also a matter of survival. When a think tank publishes a finding that cuts against a powerful interest—that a subsidy is ineffective, that a regulation has costs, that a popular policy did not work—the response is often not a counter-study but an attack on the method. The institute that can immediately show the full, documented, reproducible basis for its result can defend it; the one that cannot is left arguing from authority, which in a contested public debate is a losing position.

This is why we treat documentation and reproducibility as core to applied work rather than an optional extra. Every analysis we deliver comes with the complete record—the data as used, the code that produced every number, and the reasoning behind every choice—so that a challenged finding can be defended with evidence rather than assertion. In public-facing research, that record is not bureaucratic overhead; it is what makes the work worth publishing at all.

We structure engagements around the way applied research programmes actually run. The most focused is the single flagship study—an impact evaluation, an economic model, or a systematic review where the institute has the question and the data but needs the specialist method applied rigorously and defensibly. Here we function as the analytical engine for one high-stakes piece of work, delivered with the full reproducible record that lets the institute stand behind it.

The broader mode is a standing relationship: we provide an ongoing analytical capability that an institute draws on across its research programme, functioning as the methods bench it cannot justify staffing permanently. This suits institutes that produce a steady stream of evidence and need reliable, on-demand access to causal, modelling, and synthesis expertise. Between these, we also take on defined-scope components of a larger project—the evaluation module within a broader study, say—coordinated with the institute's own team. Scope, timeline, and confidentiality are always fixed in advance.

Although institutes often come to us for a specific analysis, the most productive relationships span more of the evidence lifecycle. An institute planning a major research programme benefits from involving us early—at the point of designing the studies and choosing the methods—rather than only when the analysis is due, because the credibility of the eventual findings is largely determined by decisions made at that design stage. A programme built from the outset around defensible identification and honest measurement produces evidence that holds; one that reaches for rigor only at the end is often trying to rescue conclusions the design cannot fully support.

At the other end of the lifecycle, we help institutes with the synthesis and dissemination that turns individual studies into influence. A body of an institute's own work, consolidated through a rigorous systematic review or a bibliometric map of the field it sits in, becomes a more authoritative contribution than any single study—and a stronger foundation for the policy engagement that is an institute's ultimate purpose. Working across the lifecycle in this way, rather than as a one-off analytical supplier, is where we add the most durable value: not just a defensible finding, but a research programme that is credible by design and influential by construction.