A broadened approach to analyzing the role of the welfare system for a sustainable working life

This program provides new and policy-relevant knowledge on how the design of social insurance systems impacts individual and societal outcomes that are important for supporting a sustainable, inclusive, and health-promoting working life, in line with the 2030 Agenda goals.

To this end, the program offers 14 research projects analyzing income insurances for illness, unemployment, or old age.The key novelty of the program is that it broadens the analytic approach of most previous research in two parallel ways.

First, it widens the scope of outcomes to comprise not only employment outcomes but also work conditions, poverty, health and well-being for the individuals at risk, and for their family members and society at large.

Secondly, it takes to heart the fact that both the income protection and the incentives that individuals face are increasingly determined by access to complementary insurances and – for foreign-born individuals – by whether a coordination of social insurances is in place between Sweden and their country of origin.

Our broad approach is made possible by combining administrative data from government agencies and collaborating insurance providers with data on complementary insurances and international agreements that we collect ourselves.

The research consists of both detailed descriptive analyses and state-of-the-art causal approaches.The program is led and managed by Associate Professor Lisa Laun at IFAU and brings together 18 scholars and experts in economics, political science, statistics and public health, from several leading departments and institutes in Sweden and abroad.

We form a new inter-disciplinary team of researchers of different academic seniority, with extensive experience in analyzing social insurances, who will collaborate in various constellations and meet all together at annual conferences.

The program will thus further strengthen and broaden the cross-disciplinary research environment at and around IFAU and in Sweden.