In the last decade, financial crises and population ageing have led to the retrenchment of the welfare state. One area under financial pressure is the provision of disability benefits. In response, governments have reduced expenditures by tightening eligibility criteria or reducing the benefit amounts. The Netherlands has become an example of such a system as it has persistently reduced the number of new individuals receiving disability benefits. Even though the reforms seem to have achieved their objective, there is little understanding of how they impact labour force participation and individual level health. The literature shows that not receiving a disability benefit leads to higher probabilities of working. However, there is surprisingly little about whether the effect is persistent, whether it differs across education groups, and whether it impacts household members. By contrast, there is a dearth of knowledge on the causal effect on health. This is especially striking since the original aim is to protect health. This research will contribute to our understanding of disability benefits by estimating their causal effect on work and health. For that, I will use unique administrative data from the Netherlands and exploit the regulations that define eligibility by means of an innovative empirical approach. The combination of this approach and the Dutch data will allow me to estimate the effect of disability benefits on work and health, and more importantly, to evaluate its persistence, its heterogeneity by education, and its impact on household members. As many countries strive for the financial sustainability of social programs, the knowledge generated in this research will provide valuable evidence of how government benefits impact labour force participation and individual level health. This nuanced understanding is essential as policy makers seek to prioritize programs and lack evidence to guide them in avoiding costly problems for future generations.

BRANDSUS focuses on the study of inclusive governance arrangements for sustainable place development (SPD) responding to calls for more holistic models of regional development in the European Union (EU) following the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including economic social and environmental sustainability. BRANDSUS will increase scientific knowledge by developing participatory place branding (PPB) as an alternative, inclusive governance framework for SPD. The project develops an innovative mixed-methods comparative case study approach (Spain-Netherlands) for the study of citizen-led governance models: a large-scale survey and a participatory intervention methodology combining participatory action research with the method of sociological intervention. BRANDSUS will also contribute to advancing research methods in public administration and the social sciences at large. The practical application of the proposed methodology will not only support place development and economic growth but also ensure social and environmental sustainability. The project contributes to societal development by providing the governance framework for stakeholders to collectively enact positive change. Inclusive and effective governance models for stakeholder engagement will enhance collaboration towards a common vision. BRANDSUS will be conducted at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University of Rotterdam, ranked 1st in 2017 and 2018 and 2nd in 2019 for the subject of Public Administration by the Shanghai Ranking. Beyond sharing my expertise and further developing innovative participatory governance methodologies, this fellowship will allow me to restart my career, as well as to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve my medium-term goal to secure a grant as a principal investigator to continue studying citizen-led governance models for SPD and my long-term goal to secure a tenured position in the EU.

The aim of this project is to analyse the long-term effects of immigration on attitudes of natives towards immigration, as well as the mechanisms through which immigration may affect natives’ attitudes. Moreover, I plan to study whether attitudes of natives towards migration have long-term economic consequences, particularly on the ability of immigrants to integrate in the natives’ society, by analysing economic outcomes of first and second generation migrants. The identification strategy relies on instrumental variables, combined with machine learning methods for causal inference.