Niall O'Higgins

Niall O'Higgins is Senior Research Specialist in the International Labour Organization's Employment Analysis Unit and Professor of Economics at the University of Salerno. Since 2008 he has been an Research Fellow at IZA, Bonn. He holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin, York and Sheffield Universities and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence.

His main research interests cover various aspects of labour and experimental economics. Previously, Senior Researcher in the ILO's Youth Employment Programme, he is one of the main authors of the ILO's biennial Global Employment Trends for Youth. Among his other recent publications are books on Internship and on youth employment policy, a chapter on NEETs in the ILO’s Global Employment Policy Review 2023: Macroeconomic policies for recovery and structural transformation as well as articles in the European Economic Review, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Journal of Institutional Economics and the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy.

He is also author of two recent papers on volunteering as a school-to-work transition mechanism, Volunteer work and its links to the labour market experiences of young people (ILO/UNV, 2020), and, On the design of Volunteer programmes to facilitate the entry and re-entry of young people into work (ILO/UNV, 2022) and the lead author on the ILO’s 2023 Youth Country briefs series undertaken in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation.