Article co-authored by Mariajose Silva Vargas, full-time PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT [Reprinted by permission from VoxDev; Francesco Loiacono] Working together with one refugee worker for one week increases firms’ likelihood to hire more refugees by adjusting business owners’ beliefs about refugees’ skills. Addressing the pressing global challenge of integrating migrants, especially in the context of forced displacement, is crucial given that migrations are considered “one of the most important geop...
A guest post by Giulia Mori, current student in our 2022-23 MPP cohort The Italian agricultural sector relies heavily on migrant workers, who accounted for almost 400,000 workers in 2020, corresponding to more than 30% of Italy’s agricultural labour force. Migrants working in the Italian fields (braccianti, or ‘a pair of arms’) are subjected to exploitation and abuse and are often trapped in the mafia-like system of caporalato, a phenomenon that involves the recruitment and exploitation of migra...
I'm a PhD candidate at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance and UNU-MERIT, doing independent research on labour supply effects of health insurance, with a particular focus on developing countries. At the conference, I will present findings from my recent work on the ‘Effects of health insurance on labour supply: a systematic review’. My research covers studies around the world, in both developed and developing countries, and seeks to provide a systematic picture of unintended labour supp...
Two senior fellows, Prof. Luc Soete and Dr. Alessio Brown, recently featured in articles by the Financial Times and T-Systems magazine. Both wrote about the future world of work amid accelerating technological change — touching on the risks and rewards and the assumptions and disruptions. In a guest post for the FT, Prof. Soete explored the challenges posed to labour markets by growing automation — a notion he roundly dispelled as a red herring. “Historically the evidence of di...
Judit Vall Castello was one of the first PhD fellows at the School of Governance: she joined our Marie Curie European Social Protection PhD programme in 2006, before graduating in 2010 with a dissertation on ‘Business Cycle and Policy Effects on Labour Market Transitions of Older and Disabled Workers in Spain’. We caught up with Judit after she gave a seminar at the School of Business and Economics in early October. … The European Social Protection PhD was an EU programme to cr...