2017 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Individual Fellowships
The Economics Department at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is looking to continue its tradition of evidence based policy-research by inviting postdoctoral researchers to apply jointly with the Economics Department for the European Commission's .
The Fellowship provides the opportunity for experienced researchers to enhance their careers in an enriching, international environment. The mission of the OECD is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The Economics Department of the OECD aims to enhance economic performance in member and selected non-member countries through sound evidence-based and innovative policy advice. It deals with a wide array of policy areas including macro-economic management, with a strong emphasis on structural policy issues. Its key products are OECD Country Surveys, the twice-yearly Economic Outlook, Going for Growth and research and policy papers on a wide range of topics. The Department is a co-convener of the Global Productivity Forum, the OECD Fiscal Network and support work related to COP 21 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It cooperates with other Directorates of the OECD on horizontal organisation-wide projects particularly to the New Approaches to Economic Challenges, and the Inclusive Growth Initiative. The Department’s policy advice is derived from a variety of sources, including country surveillance, cross-country benchmarking and evidence derived from empirical research.
The OECD Economics department undertakes in-depth studies on approaches to identify current economic challenges and to offer policy oriented solutions. Research areas in the context of the MSCA fellowship of particular interest for the Economics department are listed below.
The successful candidate will work under the supervision of a Senior Economist at the OECD Economics Department.
Reducing child poverty, strengthening female labour force participation and career opportunities and increasing fertility by enabling citizens to have as many children as they desire are long-standing policy challenges in OECD countries. Most countries use some combination of family benefits and childcare services. Broadly speaking results in the literature to date seem to indicate the following:
- One-off transfers upon childbirth do not seem to have a significant impact on either fertility or labour force participation.
- Regular child benefits tend to reduce child poverty and are sometimes found to have a weakly positive impact on fertility, but they also tend to have a negative impact on female labour force participation and employment and they re-inforce traditional family roles.
- Paid parental leave has a positive impact on fertility and can have a positive impact on female employment, provided it does not significantly exceed one year. Otherwise it can delay the return to work with a negative impact on wages and career prospects. An obligation to share parts of the leave among partners can lead to evolving patterns of sharing household obligations.
- Childcare services have a positive impact on female employment and in many studies they have also been found to have a positive impact on fertility.
These conclusions remain tentative though, and country-specific studies show heterogeneous results suggesting that the effectiveness of policies vary depending on the broader labour market and cultural context and the institutional environment. The purpose of the Marie Curie project would be to gain a better understanding of context on policy effectiveness. Research proposals would address one or several of the following features:
- Develop new evidence on the impact of different family policies on employment, labour force participation, fertility or distribution of household work among partners as well as potentially on child birth weight.
- Explore the role of context, such as individual or average family income at the country or regional level, the incidence of instable or low-paid work relationships or cultural variations.
- Explore recent policy initiatives with interesting features. This could be relatively large dimensions, such as the expansion of childcare services in Germany and child benefits in Poland, or a particular starting point in terms of low fertility and female employment rates, such as childcare service expansion in Kore and Japan, or because of their specific features, such as mortgage subsidies in Hungary conditioned on the number of future children.
Requirements and how to apply
Expressions of interest should be submitted to the Economics Department OECD by 2 June 2017. The deadline for final submission to the European Commission is 14 September 2017.
All expressions of interest must meet the eligibility criteria of the scheme.
- Candidates must be in possession of a doctoral degree at the deadline for the submission of proposals (14/09/2017).
- Eligible researchers can be of any nationality and must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in France for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before the call deadline.
Application materials should include the following:
- Research proposal summary of no more than three pages. The proposal should outline the main research question, research context, research methods and a brief project plan following the guidelines established in the call for expression of interest.
- CV
- Cover letter, outlining how the proposed research links to OECD Economics Department areas of research outlined in the call for expression of interest.
Please submit your application on-line through this link.
Expressions of interest will be evaluated based on the quality of the research proposal and the EC’s eligibility criteria. Decisions will be communicated by 23 June 2017.
The selected candidates will be supported in the development of their project proposals that must be submitted to the European Commission by September 14th, 2017, 17.00 CET.