University of Amsterdam

Prof. Herman Van de Werfhorst has worked in fields that the current proposal integrates. His VIDI-project studied institutions and mechanisms in the labour market. Three mechanisms for why education is rewarded on labour markets were examined: education as indicator of skills people obtained; education as a positional good, and education as a form of social closure. His NWO-PROO program is macro-oriented, and studies how institutions are related to inequalities. The NWO-VICI project is an important next step in this agenda, with two main innovations: (1) the mechanism approach is applied to institutional effects on inequality of educational opportunity; (2) the study of how institutions evolve and are legitimated. Van de Werfhorst has also published on micro-level mechanisms within countries, measuring people’s concerns with downward mobility (which appeared identical across social classes as relative risk aversion theory would predict), and social differences in time discounting preferences and risk attitudes as predictors of educational attainment. In the FP7 GINI project a database is created on educational institutional regulations in all European countries and the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Korea since the 1950s to present. Importantly, in the GINI project he has developed a model to analyse multilevel data with time and country variation in contextual variables with the inclusion of country and year fixed effects.

Jesper Rözer is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Amsterdam (UVA). His research interests include the life course and social networks, income inequality and health, and the sociology of education.

Dr. Thomas Leopold is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at University of Amsterdam. Before coming to Amsterdam, he completed a PhD in sociology (2008-2012) at the University of Bamberg and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012-2013) at the European University Institute. His research interests are in family sociology, comparative research, social stratification, life course research, and demography. Leopold has published extensively in top-tier journals. Methodological expertise he will bring to the project include comparative methods, demographic methods, and methods of causal analysis. Particularly relevant to the activities of WP 1 is his professional experience as a research associate in the National Educational Panel Study (2008-2012), in which he focused on large-scale assessments of educational careers.