Office for National Statistics:
ONS Research Excellence Awards 2019 - People's Choice Award to Dr Swati Dhingra
4 November 2019
The ONS's research excellence awards recognise and celebrate outstanding, innovative research carried out using ONS secure data. This research must deliver a public benefit to the UK, whilst protecting data confidentiality. Using secure research data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and HMRC, Dr Dhingra's research Trade and Worker Deskilling: Evidence from the Brexit vote, co-authored with Rui Costa and Stephen Machin, analysed both the large unexpected movements in international trade and the unexpected drop of sterling, to establish casual evidence on the impact of trade on workers.
The People's Choice Award was voted for by almost 900 people across multiple organisations. Votes were submitted across 21 innovative research projects, with the winner announced at Data Capability 2019, an event curated by ONS for the research community, at Central Hall, Westminster in London.
Frankie Kay, interim deputy national statistician and director general for data capability at ONS said: "All of our finalists showed the benefit of sharing data and we hope that their research goes on to help inform those in government, business and the charity sector who need reliable figures to make important decisions."
In a statement Dr Dhingra, Dr Costa and Professor Machin said: "We are delighted to win the ONS People's Choice Vote with our CEP paper on the wage reductions and training cutbacks resulting from the drop in the value of the pound induced by the UK's vote to leave the EU. The public need to see robust evidence about the actual economic impacts of the UK electorate's decision to leave. In the post-truth world in which we are living, this award reassures us that there is still room to do this with credible analysis of ONS data."
Find out more in our Brexit Analyses series: CEP BREXIT Analysis No.15 Falling sterling, falling wages and training: How the post-Brexit pound has hurt Britain's workers