Project funding: Academy of Finland (post-doctoral researcher fund)
Coordinator: Paul Jonker-Hoffren
The project studies the labor markets of self-employed work in Finland and the Netherlands. Self-employment is an increasingly common form of employment. This may be a result of labor market policies. Regardless of this, it is not so well-understood how the labor markets work for this category of employment. In the 1970s there was fruitful interdisciplinary research on labor markets, which main contribution was that labor markets are structurally differentiated into segments. Actors behave differently in different segments. Important research gaps have opened due to changing research trends, in particular since firms are not anymore the main arrangement of economic activity: networks are increasingly important. Self-employed work is very dependent on how networks function and my project aims to fill a research gap on this issue, since for labor market policies it is important to understand how actors in the network behave and how networks affect labor market participation.