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Researcher

Sarah Marchal

  • Research Expertise:Over the past decades, welfare states coped with tremendous and ongoing challenges. Technological advances and globalization profoundly changed western economies and labour markets. Atypical labour contracts abounded. These include part time work and temporary contracts, but also work types where it has become unclear whether someone is self-employed or an employee. This evolution led to highly complex careers at the bottom of the labour market, where vulnerable employees combine different types of contracts and alternate employment and unemployment spells. Meanwhile, socio-demographic shifts and migration have led to less stable families and less homogenous societies. The society blueprint welfare states were built on, of stable families with a male breadwinner in full-time employment, is outdated. Against this background, I look into the potential of targeted benefits as effective social policy measures, taking account of different design options, their implementation and their effectiveness in terms of poverty reduction. Academically, this research scope adds to long-standing debates on the optimal design and effectiveness of social policies. This debate urgently needs tools to assess theoretical concepts and social policy design in terms of changeable real-life situations. Academic research usually adopts an annual perspective when assessing the effectiveness of social policy measures, averaging out fluctuations in income that may be felt hard in a context of intermittent employment and benefit spells. A well-considered assessment of how this perspective influences our findings and thinking on ideal social policy measures is warranted. It is for instance well-accepted that income-targeted benefits will decrease the financial gain when moving from benefits to employment, as these benefits are withdrawn when income from work becomes available. However, in a context of highly flexible careers at the bottom of the labour market, taking up employment will not solely depend on the expected financial gain, but also on expectations regarding the duration of the employment and the ease with which someone previously gained access to benefits. This experienced ease of access ultimately depends on the implementation of social policies. Building on information on careers at the bottom of the labour market obtained from administrative records, combined with a time-sensitive assessment of policies, I aim to develop tools to assess social policy effectiveness in light of such real-world experiences. For one, I look into the effectiveness of residual means-tested minimum income protection, that automatically became more relevant as the welfare state struggled to adapt to the broad trends described above. Second, I assess the responsiveness of targeted social policies in a context of unstable labour market careers. Third, I assess the implementation of targeted social policies, looking into the incentives policy makers at different implementation levels face. Are these incentives organised in such a way to guarantee smooth access to benefits on all policy levels?
  • Keywords:SOCIAL POLICY, SOCIAL PROVISIONS, SOCIAL ASSISTANCE, Political and social sciences
  • Disciplines:Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social change, Social theory and sociological methods, Social work, Citizenship, immigration and political inequality, International and comparative politics, Multilevel governance, National politics, Public administration
  • Research techniques:My research builds to large extent on hypothetical household simulations and microsimulation.
  • Users of research expertise:My research is relevant to government institutions and (social) policy makers.