The ESRI has this evening denied that it came under pressure from the Government or any other source to withdraw "The Cost of Working in Ireland"
The paper, published initially on the ESRI's website, but later withdrawn, said that up to 44% of unemployed families were better off on the dole.
The senior author of the paper Professor Richard Tol says that he stands over his findings.
The Economic and Social Research Institute says that the analysis contained in the paper is seriously flawed, and that is the sole reason that the paper has been withdrawn.
The statement says "we are aware that Professor Tol is now in possession of a revised draft of the paper which indicates that the percentage of people with children who would be better off on social welfare than working is not 44 percent but less than 10 percent."
It says that Professor Richard Tol, now at the University of Sussex is the senior author of the working paper but claims that he did not follow ESRI procedures when submitting the working paper, which is how it came to be posted on the website.
In light of this the ESRI says that procedures for the release of working papers on the ESRI website will be revised to ensure that a similar situation does not arise in the future.
Earlier Professor Tol, who no longer works for the ESRI, said he disagreed with the Institute's assertion that the public could be misled by the paper's contents.
"As far I know, the numbers are still correct and I still stand over them. There are of, course, serious issues with the data, because unfortunately in Ireland there's no real data set that really goes to the heart of this. So we had to combine two sets of data that were collected for different purposes,'' he stated.
''But as far as I know, we've done that correctly," he added.
Professor Tol said he intends to revise the writing style of the working paper, but that the bottom line remains correct. He said he had combined two sets of data from the Central Statistics Office, which had been a complex process. He he added that as far as he was concerned, the numbers were still correct.
He said working papers were not usually subject to formal review in the ESRI, but are subject to a round of informal peer reviews.
Asked whether the withdrawal of the paper was an example of his previous criticism of the ESRI - that he was not allowed to publish true information - Professor Tol said it could ''easily be constructed as such''.
