Econ 050

Since the financial crisis in 2008, the notion of a “bail out” has become something of a household term. But what about a bail in? Assistant professor Christiaan van der Kwaak researches the Eurozone, the 19 EU states that use the euro, and he says that there are still some fundamental flaws in the system feeding calls for exiting the union. Something has to give: either more nations will attempt to follow the UK’s lead and walk away from the EU, or reforms will have to be put in place to salvage the system. Van Der Kwaak says that a common EU budget could offer a way out of the current prisoner’s dilemma, but to what extent is the Dutch government prepared to get behind that idea?

Associate professor Jochen Mierau’s background is in economics, but as a founding member of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health, he is applying his expertise to a new discipline. Health outcomes vary from one nation to the next, but zooming in on the level of neighbourhoods can shed light on best practices that can be applied on a city or regional level. Mierau says that public health is not a spectator sport, and in our conversation about the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of this academic field, in honour of the school’s namesake, he talks about how health care interventions effectively amount to a form of activism.

Microcredit was a major buzzword in the world of development aid in recent years, being breathlessly praised as a breakthrough panacea. But our guest today, professor Robert Lensink of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen, says that providing small amounts of financial support to individuals and projects can still be an effective tool, like most other trends, some bad actors took advantage of it and exploited the men and women on the receiving end. Microfinance can still be a powerful tool when its recipients are equipped with the right tools to protect themselves, but what is the effectiveness of other forms of intervention? Can aid ever be a true silver bullet, or does the entire system need to change first? Professor Lensink sat down with Econ 050 to discuss about the pros and cons of intervention.

YouTube, Netflix, Google, Facebook: these digital platforms and services have all become seemingly indispensable and inescapable parts of modern life. But how much do users truly value ostensibly free online services? How much would it be worth to you to walk away from them? That often depends strongly on how you use it. Associate professor Felix Eggers found out that for the average person, 50 dollars a month was enough to convince them to unfriend Facebook for a month. Eggers contributed to research looking into the value of not using digital platforms, which is something quite different from the value of using them, and came up with a new way to measure the economic impact of platforms where the users themselves may be the most valuable product of all.

The Netherlands sees itself as an extremely equitable country, which is not entirely without cause: it was one of the first in the world to legalize gay marriage and provides at least some paternal leave. But when it comes to achieving genuine equality in the work place – not just between men and women, but also between majority and minority groups – professor Floor Rink says that this country still has a long way to go. Over the years, her research into organisational behaviour and leadership has examined the role of mentorship, how gender roles from a young age influence hiring practices and how transparency can push companies to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity initiatives. We sat down in the studio to talk about how the glass ceiling forms far earlier for minorities, and how having any hope of getting rid of it will require recognising that it exists in the first place.