I have been engaged with research and teaching on poverty, inequality, and social policy ever since my master programme MSc in Public Policy and Human Development at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance – UN-MERIT during which I specialized in Social Policy Design (2009-2010).
Between 2011 and 2014, I worked as a social and economic policy analyst at the UNICEF Office of Research. Whilst at UNICEF, together with a team of researchers I developed a methodology for measuring and analysing child poverty called Multidimensional Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA). This methodology is currently used by many UNICEF offices and their counterparts to measure child poverty in all its dimensions, and to facilitate monitoring of trends towards reaching target 1.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Other research included mapping social protection programmes, carrying out cost analyses of social assistance, and doing background research on social policies in Europe and cash transfer programmes in Africa.
Between 2015 and 2016, I continued research on poverty and social protection at the Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI) where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Chris de Neubourg. One of my main projects involved mapping social protection programmes in Morocco, analysing their coverage of the various risk groups, and developing a vision for a more integrated social protection system. It was carried out with the support of the Ministry of General Affairs and Governance in Morocco and UNICEF.
Between 2016 an 2020, I pursued a doctorate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI), which I completed in 2021. In my doctoral thesis, I researched trends and determinants of intergenerational educational inequality in low-income contexts and analysed micro-level mechanisms behind inequality in educational trajectories. In 2019, I was a visiting scholar at the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge in 2019 where I worked on learning outcomes and school reforms.
Between 2020 and 2023, I was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), working in the project WellSIRe (Wellbeing Returns on Social Investment Recalibration). Within this project, my research focus was on social policies related to education, work and family, and their joint effects on people's life course trajectories, employment and wellbeing. I studied the potential of social investment policies to smoothen life-course transitions and reduce poverty and social inequalities in Europe.
Since August 2023, I am Junior Professor of Sociology of the Welfare State at the University of Mannheim. I carry out research and teach seminars in Bachelor and Master programmes on social stratification, life-course sociology, social and labour market inequalities, and contemporary welfare state change and challenges.
Publications
Journal Articles:
Trends and determinants of intergenerational educational inequality in sub-Saharan Africa for birth cohorts 1974 to 2003. With Fabrizio Bernardi. Sociology of Education, 2023.
Keywords: educational inequality; social stratification; trends and contextual explanations; poverty and education; material deprivation; teachers; sub-Saharan Africa
This article expands the scope of comparative social stratification research in education to rapidly developing, largely low-income sub-Saharan Africa. First, we investigate trends in the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s chances to attend and complete primary education, exploring whether and where educational expansion of the early twenty-first century led to equalization of educational opportunities. Drawing on data from 153 DHS and MICS surveys (1990 to 2017) from 40 countries, findings indicate that inequality in attendance declined, but inequality in completing six grades largely persisted. Cross-country analyses reveal a large variation in inequality levels and trends. We explore the role of national contextual factors and find that underweight prevalence, fertility rates, school fees, public spending on education, and the ratio of pupils to teaching staff systematically explain variation in SES-gaps across countries and cohorts. Findings underline the importance of absolute material deprivation and school teaching resources in the stratification of educational opportunities in this region.
Education and active labour market policy complementarities in promoting employment: Reinforcement, substitution and compensation. Social Policy & Administration, 57(2), 2023, pp. 235–253.
Keywords: ALMP, compensation, education, employment, EU-SILC, institutional complementarities, reinforcement, substitution
This paper theorises and empirically assesses how education and active labour market policy (ALMP) relate to each other in shaping individuals' employment chances in Europe. It provides a theoretical base for assessing policy complementarities building on sociological skill-formation literature, varieties of capitalism and social investment literature. Two hypotheses of complementarity are advanced: reinforcement whereby higher investment in general skills via education boosts ALMP effectiveness; and substitution-compensation whereby investments in either policy suffice, rendering individual employment chances less dependent on ALMPs at higher (prior) educational investment levels. The advanced theoretical propositions are empirically tested by looking at how individual employment chances are affected by national ALMP efforts conditional on workforce education, distinguishing between individual- and national-level educational attainment. Analyses draw on micro-level EU-SILC longitudinal data 2003–2015 from 29 European countries and 285 country-years applying mixed-effects dynamic panel regression models. Results highlight the complementarity of education in the functioning of ALMPs and show that the education-ALMP interplay follows different dynamics when individual or national education are considered, with substitution-compensation for the former and reinforcement for the latter. Higher individual educational attainment is associated with lower marginal returns from national ALMP efforts, with higher ALMP effectiveness among the lower-educated. By contrast, higher national educational attainment is associated with increased ALMP effectiveness, with ALMPs tending to be far less effective at low levels of highly educated workforce. Different interaction patterns are observed for youth, indicating increased difficulty in activating this risk group.
Social Investment as a Conceptual Framework for Analysing Well-being Returns and Reforms in 21st Century Welfare States. With Anton Hemerijck and Stefano Ronchi. Socio-Economic Review, 21(1), 2023, pp. 479–500.
Keywords: welfare state, institutional complementarity, social policy, capabilities, sociology, comparative politics
Welfare provision is often conceived through the lens of decommodification and analysed in (re)distributive terms. This article argues that a distributive approach does not sufficiently capture the complexity of 21st century welfare state dynamics. It proposes re-conceptualizing provision as a mix of three policy functions: raising and maintaining human capital stock; easing the flow of gendered life-course and labour-market transitions; guaranteeing social safety-net buffers. This analytical perspective allows theorizing life-course multiplier effects and policy (non-)complementarities, both at the level of individual objective and subjective well-being and in terms of aggregate employment, poverty and fiscal sustainability. This perspective also enables us to extend the temporal horizon of welfare politics beyond short-term electoral logics for explaining welfare reform. The article underscores how methodological pluralism remains key for understanding contemporary welfare states, and for grasping welfare outcomes and institutional change in a research endeavour that involves both generalization and contextualization.
Measuring returns on social investment beyond here-and-now redistribution: A commentary on Parolin and Van Lancker's response article. With Anton Hemerijck. Journal of European Social Policy, 31(3), 2021, pp. 309–320.
Keywords: compensation and capacitation, configurational effects of policy synergies, Matthew effects, policy complementarities, social investment returns, welfare state
Social policy research is truly interdisciplinary with academics from very different theoretical perspectives working together in fervent open-mindedness towards diverse methodological approaches. The exploration of social investment (SI) welfare provision is a clear example of this spirit of interdisciplinary engagement, having stirred up critical scholarly reception and debate over the past decade. On the one hand, some colleagues underscore the potential of SI policies to improve life chances. On the other hand, some researchers voice concerns about perverse unintended consequences of SI. The most worrying scholarly critique of SI is the conjecture that SI policies reinforce rather than alleviate inequality and poverty, because of the operation of so-called Matthew effects (MEs). Parolin and Van Lancker’s commentary on our article ‘The social investment litmus test: family formation, employment and poverty’ falls within the purview of the ME critique, with some extension to other shortcomings discussed in the literature. These criticisms certainly deserve engagement, and we are grateful to the editorial board of the Journal of European Social Policy for inviting us to do so fully. In our commentary, we commence with the multidimensionality of 21st-century welfare state provision. Subsequently, we turn to the welfare state’s carrying capacity, which we maintain needs to be taken into consideration for leveraging positive feedback mechanisms between the micro and the macro level of welfare provision. By so doing, we elaborate on the implications of our research approach for understanding MEs, with insights as to how they are exacerbated or mitigated through policy (in-)complementarities. We then discuss the importance of considering synergies between policies for an improved understanding of SI returns and possible source(s) of MEs. Finally, we turn to the misconception that capacitating SI policies and compensatory consumption-smoothing and poverty alleviation are somehow in competition with each other, and discuss the normative orientation underlying SI welfare provision.
The Social Investment Litmus Test: Family Formation, Employment and Poverty. With Anton Hemerijck. Journal of European Social Policy, 31(3), 2021, pp. 282–296.
Keywords: Social Investment returns, Life-course, Families with children, Employment, Poverty, OECD
Over the past decade, the notion of ‘Social Investment’ (SI) has gained considerable traction in the political debates over welfare state futures. The multifaceted character of SI policy interventions, the effects of policy complementarities and interactions for different social groups and generational cohorts, and the challenge of delineating effects across different time dimensions, we argue, are not (yet) properly addressed by current empirical research. This paper contributes to reorienting the measurement of SI returns into a longer-term perspective, conceptualising them as people’s work- and welfare- related outcomes. It operationalizes in a novel fashion macro-level data across OECD countries to analyse the medium-term aggregate effects of SI stock, flow and buffer policies with a focus on arguably the most critical stages in the post-industrial life-cycle course: transition into employment and family formation. Our findings imply that the so-called Matthew Effects identified in previous research stem from a measurement of SI returns conceptualized in a short-term redistributive perspective. Moving on to longer-term returns to SI policies at the societal level reveals positive outcomes for families with children.
Analysing Multidimensional Child Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: Findings Using an International Comparative Approach. With Marlous de Milliano. Child Indicators Research, 11(3), 2018, pp. 805-833.
Keywords: Child poverty. Multidimensional deprivation. Child rights. Sub-Saharan Africa.
This study provides with a first indication on the number of multidimensionally poor children in sub-Saharan Africa. It presents a methodology measuring multidimensional child deprivation within and across countries, and it is in line with the Sustainable Development Goal 1 focusing on multidimensional poverty by age and gender. Using the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology, the study finds that 67% or 247 million children are multidimensionally poor in the thirty sub-Saharan African countries included in the analysis. Multidimensional poverty is defined as missing two to five aspects of basic child well-being captured by dimensions anchored in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, namely nutrition, health, education, information, water, sanitation, and housing. The analysis also predicts the multidimensional child poverty rates for the whole sub-Saharan African region estimating 64% or 291 million children to be multidimensionally poor. In comparison, monetary poverty rates measured as less than USD 1.25 PPP per capita spending a day and weighted by the child population size finds 48% poor children. The results of this study highlight the extent of multidimensional poverty among children in sub-Saharan Africa and the need for children to have a specific poverty measure in their own right.
Child Poverty in the European Union: The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis Approach (EU-MODA). With Y. Chzhen, C. de Neubourg, and M. de Milliano. Child Indicators Research, 9(2), 2016, pp. 335-356.
Keywords: Child poverty. Child well-being. Multidimensional poverty. Poverty and deprivation overlap.
Poverty has serious consequences for children’s well-being as well as for their achievements in adult life. The Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis for the European Union (EU-MODA) compares the living conditions of children across the EU member states. Rooted in the established multidimensional poverty measurement tradition, EU-MODA contributes to it by using the international framework of child rights to inform the construction of indicators and dimensions essential to children’s material well-being, taking into account the needs of children at various stages of their life cycle. The study adds to the literature on monetary child poverty and material deprivation in the EU by analysing several age-specific and rights-based dimensions of child deprivation individually and simultaneously, constructing multidimensional deprivation indices, and studying the overlaps between monetary poverty and multidimensional deprivation. The paper demonstrates the application of the EU-MODA methodology to three diverse countries: Finland, Romania and the United Kingdom. The analysis uses data from the ad hoc material deprivation module of the EU-SILC 2009 because it provides comparable micro-data for EU member states and contains child-specific deprivation indicators.
Working papers:
Education as an equalizer for human development? With Fabrizio Bernardi. Background paper for the UNDP Human Development Report 2019: Tackling Inequality in the 21st Century.
This paper examines the potential of education to act as the ‘great equalizer’ and reduce the negative effects of economic inequality on health and other social outcomes, such as crime, educational proficiency and, in particular, social mobility. In the first part, we examine the relationship between economic inequality, education and 10 social outcomes across 153 countries at a macro level. We find that economic inequality is associated with worse outcomes in some but not all health and social problems analyzed, and that the relationship is stronger in countries of higher human development. As expected, we find confirmation that societies with higher average education have better outcomes. Nonetheless, education does not moderate the negative effect of economic inequality. In the second part, we discuss to what extent education can be an equalizer of intergenerational mobility chances at an individual level. The available evidence suggests that schooling is indeed an equalizer of cognitive skills, although upper-class families consistently manage to avoid downward social mobility for their children in case of low performance. Education is then the elevator that can move up for children from families with low socioeconomic status. The elevator does not, however, move down in cases of failure for high socioeconomic status families. This result sheds some shadows on the full potential of education to promote social mobility.
Lost (in) Dimensions: Consolidating progress in multidimensional poverty research. With C. de Neubourg and M. de Milliano. Working Paper No. 2014-04, UNICEF Office of Research, Florence.
Keywords: Child poverty. Child well-being. poverty. poverty reduction.
Identifying, locating and profiling the poor and deprived individuals in a society are the most basic imperatives for good social policy design. Understanding why people are, and remain, poor is the next analytical step. Multidimensional poverty and deprivation estimates are important new tools in this undertaking. This paper reviews the insights of various contributions from research into multidimensional poverty and deprivation and combines them into an internally consistent framework. The framework adds an important element by emphasising that people may experience various types and forms of poverty and deprivation simultaneously. The experience of poverty is often multifaceted and deprivations are interrelated in many cases. This highlights the necessity to clearly separate the different concepts of poverty and to study their overlap.
Cross-country MODA Study: Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) - Technical note. With C. de Neubourg, J. Chai, M. de Milliano, and Z. Wei. Working Paper 2012-05, UNICEF Office of Research, Florence.
Keywords: Child well-being. Comparative analysis. Poverty.
Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) is a methodology developed by UNICEF which provides a comprehensive approach to the multidimensional aspects of child poverty and deprivation. MODA builds on earlier multidimensional poverty studies and encompasses a large set of tools ranging from deprivation headcounts in single dimensions via multiple overlap analysis to multidimensional deprivation ratios and their decomposition. The MODA methodology places the child at the heart of the analysis and concentrates on those aspects of well-being that are relevant for the children at particular stages of their lives. Moreover, the analysis indicates which deprivations children experience simultaneously.
Step-by-Step Guidelines to the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA). With C. de Neubourg, J. Chai, M. de Milliano, and Z. Wei. Working Paper 2012-06, UNICEF Office of Research, Florence.
Keywords: Child well-being. Comparative analysis. Poverty. Statistical methodology.
Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) is a UNICEF methodology which provides a comprehensive approach to the multidimensional aspects of child poverty and deprivation. MODA builds on earlier multidimensional poverty studies and encompasses a large set of tools ranging from deprivation headcounts in single dimensions via multiple overlap analysis to multidimensional deprivation ratios and their decomposition.
Reports:
Mapping of the current social protection system in Morocco – Mapping de la Protection Sociale au Maroc. With Aminata Bakouan Traoré, Virginie Reboul, Chris de Neubourg. 2018, Ministère Délégué auprès du Chef du Gouvernement chargé des Affaires Générales et de la Gouvernance (MAGG), UNICEF, Nations Unies Maroc.
Comme dans la plupart des pays du monde, les composantes du système de protection sociale au Maroc ont été développées de manière fragmentée sur une période très longue. Aujourd'hui le système au Maroc se compose d’un système de sécurité sociale qui est contributif (CMR, RCAR, CNSS, CNOPS, …), d’un système de protection sociale partiellement contributif (RAMED), et d’un système de protection sociale non-contributif (Tayssir, Kafala, IINDH, établissements de protection sociale pour les personnes en difficulté. Des gains d'efficience et des gains d'efficacité peuvent être réalisés par une reformulation des composantes de la protection sociale marocaine dans un système plus intégré ; l'efficience croît lorsque le même résultat est délivré à moindre coût; l’efficacité est améliorée lorsque les résultats escomptés sont obtenus pour les familles, les enfants, les plus vulnérables et les bénéficiaires en général. Cette étude vise à réorganiser et à réformer les éléments existants dans le contexte de la réalité sociale, économique et politique du Maroc et proposer d’autres composantes destinées aux catégories sociales non couvertes. Dans l'étude, une attention particulière est accordée à la situation des enfants dans la société marocaine selon une approche axée sur l’équité. L’étude a donc pour objectif global l'élaboration d'une vision intégrée et harmonisée de la protection sociale au Maroc, à partir de l’analyse de l'état des lieux et à la lumière des bonnes pratiques internationales dans ce domaine.
En mars 2015, un atelier de lancement du processus d’élaboration d’une vision intégrée de la protection sociale au Maroc a été organisé par le Ministère Délégué auprès du Chef du Gouvernement Chargé des Affaires Générales et de la Gouvernance (MAGG) avec l’appui de l’UNICEF. L’atelier, qui était la première étape du processus, réunissait les principaux départements ministériels et organismes impliqués dans la protection sociale dans le Royaume. Cet atelier a été suivi en avril de la même année, d’une série d’entretiens bilatéraux menés par l’équipe de consultants avec les responsables de la formulation et de la mise en œuvre des composantes de la protection sociale existantes. Les entretiens ont permis à l’équipe d’obtenir des informations très détaillées sur les programmes en cours. Le présent rapport, la cartographie du système de protection sociale au Maroc, a été élaboré sur la base de ces entretiens bilatéraux et d’une revue documentaire détaillée. Dans ce rapport, l’étude fait une analyse à trois niveaux : une analyse de l’intégration au niveau politique (analyse du système: objectifs et fonctions bien définis et accordés), une analyse de l’intégration au niveau programmatique (l’équilibre entre les composantes du système, les chevauchements, les duplications ou contradictions; les composantes harmonisées, pertinentes et consistantes) et enfin une analyse de l’intégration au niveau de la gouvernance et de l’administration (les bases de données coordonnées, les procédures harmonisés, les systèmes de suivi et évaluation).
Child Poverty in Kenya: A Multidimensional Approach. With E. Elezaj and C. de Neubourg. 2017, Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
This study provides estimates of child poverty in Kenya in 2014 using a multidimensional approach, fulfilment of children’s basic needs and rights. It identifies the most vulnerable children, where the most deprived children live, the relationship between different types of deprivation that children experience, factors associated with child deprivation and poverty, and compares children’s multidimensional deprivation with monetary poverty. The report also compares the situation of children in realizing their rights in 2014 with 2008- 09 to shed light into the progress achieved in child poverty reduction. The methodology used in the study allows the generation of evidence to track progress in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1.2 on poverty reduction in all its dimensions for children, and SDG 10 on inequality reduction. Child poverty in this study is defined as deprivation in three to six dimensions. The indicators and dimensions used to measure child poverty were selected through a participatory and extensive consultation process involving the Kenya Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), sectoral experts from ministries in Kenya, sectoral specialists from UNICEF, and the Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI). The study included a qualitative research component to identify the barriers in provision and demand of basic services and hurdles that children and their parents face in accessing them. The fieldwork was conducted during August 2016 in three selected counties, Turkana, Kakamega, and Kitui, on the dimensions of nutrition, health, education, water, and sanitation. Key informant interviews and focus group discussions were held with duty bearers and claimholders represented by parents, health facility personnel, community health workers, teachers, and county government representatives.
Multidimensional Child Deprivation Trend Analysis in Ethiopia. Further analysis of the 2000, 2005 and 2011 Demographic and Health Surveys data. With Kibur, M., Bitew, M., Gebreselassie, T., Matsuda, Y., Pearson, R. 2013, Calverton, MD: ICF International and UNICEF
This child-focused deprivation analysis sheds light on child poverty in Ethiopia, measuring child deprivation by using a number of dimensions of survival and development. It presents how different dimensions other than income poverty affect child well-being by using indicators from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Surveys (2000, 2005 and 2011) and matching those to the rights contained in the CRC. The study measures the levels of child deprivation for the under-five child population and assesses overall progress in child deprivation reduction in Ethiopia over the years 2000 to 2011. The results show that while the deprivation incidence has decreased significantly in almost all dimensions between 2000 and 2011, the joint distribution of deprivations reveals that the percentage of children experiencing several deprivations at a time has decreased only marginally. In 2011, almost all children (94 per cent) still suffered from at least two deprivations considered as a threat to their survival or development. The average deprivation intensity was very high, children on average experiencing 3.8 deprivations at a time. This, however, is slightly lower compared to 2000 when children were on average deprived in 4.5 out of all six dimensions analysed. The deprivation overlap analysis shows differences in the extent to which the analysed sectors overlap, and reveals that children do not suffer from the same combinations of deprivations across regions. The study reveals significant disparities in multidimensional child deprivation levels between rural and urban areas and among regions. The highest child deprivation rates in 2011 were in Afar, SNNPR, Oromiya and Somali regions, while the lowest were in Addis Ababa, Harari and Dire Dawa. The highest decrease in the child deprivation level since 2000 has occurred in Amhara, Tigray, and Beneshangul Gumuz. Overall, the study aims to encourage the integration of child-specific needs into national poverty reduction strategies.
Other contributions:
The Cost of Social Cash Transfer Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. With M. de Milliano and S. Handa. 2014, The Transfer Project: Research Brief.
Cross-country Comparison of Multidimensional Child Deprivation Incidence and Intensity in sub-Saharan Africa. With Marlous de Milliano. MODA In Brief 4. Office of Research – Innocenti.
Multidimensional Child Deprivation and Monetary Poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. With Marlous de Milliano. MODA In Brief 7. Innocenti Working Paper No. 2014-19.
MODA database (last inserted data set: December 2014) With M. de Milliano, Y. Chzhen and C. de Neubourg. UNICEF Office of Research.
This web portal was designed at the UNICEF Office of Research between 2012 and 2014. It contains the following outputs and resources:
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Cross-country Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis for Children (CC-MODA) analyzing child deprivation for low- and lower-middle income countries according to internationally accepted standards of child well-being, utilizing internationally comparable datasets that contain child-specific information, i.e. DHS and MICS. The 'CC-MODA Technical Note' describes the technicalities of this analysis.
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National MODA analysis for Children (N-MODA), an application of the MODA methodology to specific national contexts with customized dimensions, thresholds and indicators, utilizing richer information available from national datasets. This section is based on the input of countries carrying out N-MODA.
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MODA for the European Union (EU-MODA) using cross-country comparable data for 27 EU member states, as well as Iceland and Norway, from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey.
Video source: UNICEF-IRC: Multidimensional Child Poverty.
Research in progress:
Intergenerational educational inequality in sub-Saharan Africa for birth cohorts 1974-2003: Trends and macro-level explanations. With Fabrizio Bernardi.
Keywords: Trends in inequality; Educational opportunity; Primary school completion; Macro-level context; sub-Saharan Africa
While cross-country comparison on trends and determinants of educational inequality by parental socioeconomic status (SES) is abundant in high-income societies, evidence for low-income countries is scarce. Consequently, we do not know whether and why inequality of educational opportunity has changed over time in countries where mass educational expansion is currently taking place. In this article, we expand the geographic scope of research on inequality of educational opportunity to rapidly developing but still largely low-income sub-Saharan Africa. This study combines 153 Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys in 40 countries over 28 years (1990-2017) capturing over half a million children. First, we investigate trends in the SES gap in educational opportunities – the association between SES and children’s chances to attend and complete basic education – for cohorts born between 1974 and 2003. Findings reveal that educational expansion of the 2000s in Africa did not equalise children’s chances to complete basic education. For most countries, inequality in attendance decreased but the SES gap in completion persisted or increased. Second, we explore the role of contextual factors in explaining the observed variation in inequality between countries and cohorts. Estimates show that living standards, demographic developments, public investments in education, and armed conflict occurrence matter more for inequality in educational opportunities than economic development. Additionally, colonial history explains a large share of cross-country variation in SES-gaps underlining the importance of institutional legacies in the stratification process.
Unequal educational trajectories in Ethiopia.
Keywords: Inequality. Cognitive ability. School transitions. Ethiopia.
This paper investigates the relationship between children’s early cognitive abilities and later parental decisions, focusing on disparities by parental socioeconomic status (SES). It tests whether differences in children’s initial cognitive abilities are reinforced or compensated by families’ educational investment decisions across three transition points of the educational cycle: upper primary, secondary, and higher education. The analysis is based on the
Young Lives longitudinal study which followed the lives of two birth cohorts born around 1994 and 2001 in four countries, including 3,000 children in Ethiopia. Findings point at three sources of inequality in educational opportunities. Firstly, poorer children on average develop lower cognitive abilities during childhood which negatively affects their later school transitions. This finding underlines the need for more policy efforts to equalize cognitive development opportunities early in life. Secondly, high-SES parents tend to compensate in case of early disadvantage at the primary school level. At higher levels of education, any remaining disadvantage is reinforced for all children, but SES gaps in children’s chances to make transitions increase at each level. Thirdly, low-SES children have meagre chances to transit to tertiary education, also when their initial endowments are high. This points at a loss of talent and a need to reduce existing barriers for children from low-SES families to transit to higher levels of education.
How to explain policy recalibration and inertia? The case of post-1989 family policy in Latvia and Poland. With Maciej Sobocinski.
Paper for the ESPANet 2018 Conference.
Over the past decade, the notion of ‘Social Investment’ (SI) has gained considerable traction in the political debates over welfare state futures. The multifaceted character of SI policy interventions, the effects of policy complementarities and interactions for different social groups and generational cohorts, and the challenge of delineating effects across different time dimensions, we argue, are not (yet) properly addressed by current empirical research. This paper contributes to reorienting the measurement of SI returns into a longer-term perspective, conceptualising them as people’s work- and welfare- related outcomes. It operationalizes in a novel fashion macro-level data across OECD countries to analyse the medium-term aggregate effects of SI stock, flow and buffer policies with a focus on arguably the most critical stages in the post-industrial life-cycle course: transition into employment and family formation. Our findings imply that the so-called Matthew Effects identified in previous research stem from a measurement of SI returns conceptualized in a short-term redistributive perspective. Moving on to longer-term returns to SI policies at the societal level reveals positive outcomes for families with children.
Photos from personal archives
