Which regime works best in social welfare?:Comparing outcomes of eight Dutch RCT experiments

Current technological innovations (automation, robotization, digitization, AI, big data) may have adverse employment effects notably for the low skilled welfare recipients. They face reduced chances for getting access to secure and fairly paid jobs also while two in three lack the basic qualifications needed to acquire the lowest level jobs, let alone that also more than one third consider themselves unfit to work due to serious physical or mental health issues. Therefore, eight Dutch municipalities (Deventer, Groningen, Nijmegen, Tilburg, Utrecht, Wageningen, Apeldoorn-Epe, Oss) started in the fall of 2017 and early 2018 a two-year long unique randomized control trial (RCT) to test three alternative regimes for people on welfare in which more than 5,000 recipients participated2. The treatments set up were (1) exemption/selfmanagement, that is exemption of the application obligations and rendering more trust and autonomy to the recipient for self-management, (2) intensive or tailored support, that is providing tailored and intensified counselling support to improve claimants’ work and social participation opportunities (e.g., in education, training or volunteer work) and (3) earnings release, that is rewarding welfare claimants for finding work by allowing participants to keep a larger part of their earnings on top of their benefit (work bonus). The experiments share some features of participation and basic income approaches even though their design and implementation are rather different. We found no evidence that the alternative welfare regimes have reduced employment effects compared to ‘workfare’ regimes. In some municipalities we find small positive significant effects on parttime and fulltime employment and on people’s self-efficacy, social trust and trust in caseworker’ support. No significant positive effects were found on health and wellbeing. The use of field experiments for testing the outcomes of alternative welfare regimes provides new avenues for welfare state policy in an era of rapid technological and economic change

Younger medical specialists and longer waiting time:cohort study of the duration of medical training

OBJECTIVE: To describe trends and developments in the total duration of training medical specialists in the Netherlands, including their ages upon completion of the components of medical education: undergraduate medical program, waiting time and further post-graduate specialist training.DESIGN: Population cohort study.METHOD: From the combined data from Statistics Netherlands and the Registration Committee for Medical Specialists for the period 1986 to 2018 relevant populations were selected and training trajectories were mapped. The population size was 40,604 individuals for undergraduate medical programs, 41,885 for the duration of post-graduate specialist training, 31,915 for the waiting periods and 21666 for the total duration of the trajectory from the start of medical school until registration as a specialist.RESULTS: The median duration of undergraduate medical programs was 7.1 years, which is longer than the nominal duration and this remained unchanged over the observation period. The average waiting time between graduating medical school and postgraduate specialist training has increased from 2010 onwards to 3.7 years in 2018. The average duration of postgraduate specialist training is increasing. The average age at graduation of medical school fell by 1.7 years to 26.1. The average age at the start of post-graduate specialist training decreased, as did the average age at registration as a specialist.CONCLUSION: The total duration of training of medical specialists is stable. Changes such as "dedicated transition year" and flexible arrangements for postgraduate training have had no discernible influence on the total duration of medical training. Because the average age at start of postgraduate specialist training has decreased, medical specialists are on average younger upon registration.</p

Education-job (mis)match and interregional migration:Italian university graduates’ transition to work

This paper analyses the micro-level determinants of the education-job (mis)matches of recent university graduates in Italy. As the Italian graduate population has experienced increasing internal migration, we focus in particular on the role of interregional migration in driving education-job match. The methodology takes into account both the endogenous relationship between migration and employment, and the self-selection bias between employment and education-job (mis)match. Using a survey on Italian graduates’ entry into the labour market, we find that whilst migration at the national level is confirmed to have a positive role in both finding a job and decreasing the probability of overeducation, robust differences emerge when looking at the subnational dimension. Indeed, the Northern regions by receiving inflows of Southern graduates that manage to attain a good education-job match in the recipient labour markets, are apparently reaping part of the return to the investment in university education bore in the Sout

Entering a Knowledge Pearl in Times of Creative Cities Policy and Strategy. The Case of Groningen, Netherlands

This chapter argues that: (1) urban inequalities and injustices associated with creative urbanism, for example in terms of employment, income, or housing, are not always visible in the way typically associated with global cities and therefore require nuanced analysis; (2) the “creative cities” paradigm (as well as the contestatory right to the city framework or the just city debate) offers a powerful explanatory device for global neoliberal urbanism, including examples of “creativity orthodoxy” and the capitalist city in Amsterdam, and (3) Groningen in the northern region of The Netherlands provides a compelling case of hidden inequalities and the politics of urban development in what Gabe et al. (2012) and van Winden et al. (Urban Studies 44 (3): 525-549, 2007) would term a “knowledge pearl” city.</p

The price of mobility

This paper addresses the question concerning the price of geographic mobility in various labour market and migration scenarios. Pivotal points are expected mobility premiums which are sufficient to tip the scales in favour of moving to a geographically distinct location. These premiums are first derived within a theoretical model, accounting not only for location-specific amenity levels or labour market conditions, but also for heterogeneous personality traits and preferences. Derived hypotheses demonstrate that—in presence of heterogeneous psychic costs or adjustment capabilities—expected mobility premiums can remain distinctly positive even in an unemployment scenario. Furthermore, adjustment capabilities are to a large extent related to earlier mobility experiences, implying that labour mobility is partially learnable