Alan Barrett is the Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland. He joined the ESRI in 1994, upon the completion of his doctoral studies at Michigan State University. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin.

His main research interests are in the areas of labour economics and population economics. He has a particular interest in migration and has published on the topic in journals such as Labour Economics, the International Migration Review, the Journal of Population Economics, Economics Letters, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. He has also written on other labour topics such as training and the distribution of earnings and has published on these topics in outlets such as the British Journal of Industrial Relations and the Industrial and Labor Relations Review.

Between 2011 and 2015, he was a member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. In 2015, he chaired Ireland's National Economic Dialogue.

He joined IZA as a research fellow in December 1998.