My current research focuses on three broad themes: (1) career effects of specific and broad education, (2) inequality in education, and (3) firms and inequality.

Career effects of education
From 2021 onwards I will work on CAREER, a project funded with an Starting Grant from the European Research Council. Together with a team consisting of two PhD-students (Luisa Buchartz and Viktor Decker) and a postoctoral researcher (Marie Labussiere), we aim to investigate how careers of school-leavers with occupation-specific and general educational qualifications differ. Technological changes and the automation of occupational tasks present societies with a challenge: Is it still sensible to provide students with occupation-specific (vocational) education? Or are students with general educational qualifications better equipped for the future, given that what is demanded in the labor market is under rapid change? In CAREER, we will investigate how labor market demands change, and how these changes in the macro context affect individual workers. Its core hypothesis is that vocational graduates have a late-career disadvantage because their occupation-specific skills hinder labor market mobility, particularly when labor market demands alter quickly.

Inequality in education
I work on several projects that deal with inequality of educational opportunity. In 2020 I gathered survey data on how parents dealed with the first Covid-19 related school closures in the Netherlands. More specifically, I studied potential mechanisms by which school closures will increase existing inequalities in educational opportunity between children from different backgrounds. In the large and interdisciplinary GUTS-project (PI: Eveline Crone, funded by a NWO Gravitation grant), together with sociologists and neuroscientists I will study (inequality in) the life courses of adolescents. A novel project (PI: Louise Elffers) focuses on selection in education, and how this affects inequality of educational opportunity.

IFirms and inequality
Together with Mathijs de Vaan and others, I am interested in how firms structure inequality in society. Using Dutch register data, the aim is to get a better idea of how and why some workers earn more than others, and how firms play a role in this. A current working paper focuses on gender inequality in bonus compensation. Here we study how performance pay differs between and within firms, relying on data of all firms in the Netherlands over a period of more than 10 years.