General information
AIAS is an interdisciplinary institute, established by the departments of economics, sociology, law, psychology and health at the University of Amsterdam. It is a unique high-level expert centre for research and teaching in the Netherlands on industrial relations, organisation of work, wage formation, labour market inequalities and social policy. AIAS maintains a number of databases on trade union membership, collective bargaining and labour market institutions, and collective agree¬ments, and it provides essential scientific support to large national survey-based internet databases on individual wages. For the present Network of Excellence, existing collaborations between AIAS and SCHOLAR are pursued and strengthened. SCHOLAR is a research group of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Amsterdam, funded by the Netherlands’ Organisation for Scientific Research for 7 years. It studies, firstly, the efficiency of the transition from education and the labour market and its consequences for economic development. Secondly it is on the equity aspects of the transition between education and the labour market.
Research programme
Current research themes of AIAS and SCHOLAR include
- the impact of Europe on national and international wage formation, social policy and industrial relations; this includes studies of European employment policy, industrial relations and social dialogue;
- wage inequality and the demand for low-wage labour; this comprises projects of the LoWER network (see below) such as (a) Can improving low-skilled consumer-services jobs help European job growth?, (b) The European-American Employment Gap, Wage Inequality, Earnings Mobility and Skills, © Demand Patterns and Employment Growth: Consumption and Services in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US, and (d) Societal and Economic Effects on Quality of Life and Well-being: Preference Identification and Priority Setting in response to Changes in Labour Market Status;
- the prospects and policies of ‘overcoming marginalisation’ in employment, in particular in retailing, health, printing and construction industries; AIAS has a leading role in Fifth Framework research on the issue.
- the cycles of policy learning and mimicking in labour market and welfare reforms in Europe, and the use of the Open Method of Coordination in employment, pension and social inclusion policy;
- female agency, work organisation – including the household division of labour – and family- and gender-related collective bargaining outcomes.
- the Dutch model in a comparative perspective – scrutiny of its successes and the significance of labour market indicators, the changing structure of wages, income inequalities; the implications of the extremely rapid increase in female, agency, and part-time work are the subjects of Ford Foundation funded research on the architecture of labour market statistics;
- the optimal investment in schooling (education and training) during the life cycle.
- the optimal division between investments in general skills and vocational skills, and the optimal provision of vocational skills
- the optimal transitions between: i) home and school; ii) school and work; iii) work, unemployment and non-participation in the labour market; iv) from one job to another; and the role of schooling in these transitions.
- the effects of all these on the efficiency of the labour market and economic development, and the improvement of efficiency of the labour market and economic development by public policy.
International networks and collaboration
AIAS hosts the co-ordination of the highly productive European Low-wage Employment Research Network LoWER and its research projects, funded by the European Commission since 1996 by the Fourth and Fifth Framework Programmes. This network comprises leading institutes and researchers in the field from most EU countries.
AIAS hosts the co-ordination of the WOLIWEB project. WOLIWEB was recently funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme. WOLIWEB will investigate the socio-economic determinants of citizens’ work life attitudes, preferences and perceptions, using data from the continuous web-based European Wage Indicator Survey. The Survey covers nine European Countries (www.loonwijzer.nl).
SCHOLAR has done commissioned research within the contexts of the OECD and the EU (e.g. Targeted Socio-Economic Research TSER). Its researchers collaborate with researchers across Europe and the USA (e.g. OECD, Worldbank, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tinbergen Institute, SOFI (Partner 1 of present proposal).
