My postdoctoral project for the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie fellowship deals with recessions and health. The aim of the proposal is to provide a comprehensive analysis of how individual health is affected (both in the short and in the long-run) when recessions cause uncertainty on the labour-market. To achieve this aim, I will exploit two major recessions – the 2008 Great Recession and the 1990s Swedish recession – as well as particularly rich administrative data to answer two well-posed and policy-relevant questions: (1) Do individuals who experience major labour-market uncertainty during by recessions suffer from health disorders in the short-run? (2) Do recessions at career entry negatively affect health over the life-course – and in particular in the long-run? To adress these questions, the proposal will tackle two related and complementary specific objectives: (1) Analyse the short-term consequences of the drastic cuts in art subsidies in the Netherlands in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession – which triggered major labour market uncertainty in the art sector – on health outcomes for individuals in the art sector. (2) Investigate the long-run health effects of graduating in the 1990s Swedish Great recession using an innovative life-course perspective. Both the framework and the methodology used in these two projects are challenging and new. First, I exploit natural experiments as exogenous shocks on labour-market conditions, which allows deriving causal estimates. Second, I use particularly rich linked administrative data over long periods of time, which enables me to take a life-course perspective. I strongly believe that this unprecedented combination of the original concepts, the methodology, that is completely new to the field, and my particularly large and rich datasets will provide a completely new avenue to understand how individual health responding to labour-market uncertainty caused by recessions is affected, both in the short and long-run.

Age-related loss of physical ability and balance control are important predictors for falls in older people. Activities of daily life, such as stair negotiation, are challenging as they require older people to operate close to their functional limits. This makes stair negotiation performance a good candidate to detect early-onset deterioration before a fall occurs, as well as a good task-specific exercise modality. To investigate these assumptions, I will first assess the sensitivity of linear and non-linear analyses of data from body-worn inertial measurement units (IMUs) to detect age-related and training-induced changes in balance control of older people (65+ years). These findings will then be applied to assess improvements of balance control and the underlying changes in neuromuscular organisation following a 1-year home-based stair climbing exercise program in older people. Finally, I aim to elucidate the role of cortical involvement in neuromuscular organisation during stair negotiation in older people using electroencephalograms and analyses of muscle synergies obtain from electromyographic signals of the lower limb muscles. This will allow me to assess the level of cortico-synergy coherence and the plastic changes associated with training-induced adaptations in kinematic profiles during stair negotiation. The findings from this project will contribute to a better understanding of age-related and training-induced adaptations in balance control, neuromuscular organisation, and the role of cortical involvement in task-specific adaptations. In addition, the assessments of sensitivity of current and novel analyses of inertial data will help to improve detection of early-onset deterioration of balance performance to better target training interventions at individuals with increased fall risk.

The party-voter representative linkage is central to modern democracies. Because political parties, once in office, steer fiscal and social policies, the social groups they claim to represent in their group appeals matter for distributing tangible public goods and specially the equitable treatment of minority groups by the government. While many party politics studies are devoted to parties’ policy appeals and their role in political representation, group appeals have received little attention thus far, leaving a theoretical and empirical gap. Recent studies begin to address this oversight but these works are still few and limited in scope, using either longitudinal, single-country data, or cross-national, time-limited data. Combining insights from political, communication, and computational linguistics, GAPREP will build a new software library (SL) for the computational analysis of political texts (R package). The SL will then be used to analyse group appeals in more than 950 election manifestos in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK between 1949-2022, building a new and publicly available dataset. Together with cross-national historical survey data on voters’ demographics and party preferences from the 1980s onwards (given available data), advanced statistical modelling will reveal how representative of social groups parties have been over the past 40 years. Pushing scholarship on the party-voter linkage still further, the project will also use a unique vignette survey experiment to study the underlying mechanism of this linkage by examining voters’ reactions to parties’ group appeals. Combining these efforts, findings will illuminate social groups' access to power, and social and political equality. Offering a new perspective on the party-voter linkage, the project aims to positively contribute to voters’ contemporary low levels of political trust, which is central to the healthy functioning of modern liberal democracies.

2019 was the largest fire year since at least 1997 within the Arctic Circle, largely driven by Siberian fires. The arctic-boreal region stores about two atmospheres worth of soil carbon with 90 % currently locked in permafrost soils, or perennially frozen ground. Fire releases parts of this carbon stock, which may induce a vigorous climate warming feedback. FireIce will investigate feedbacks between climate warming and arctic-boreal fires by studying direct and longer-term carbon emissions from fires. FireIce will acquire highly needed observations of carbon emissions from Siberian forest and tundra fires. On top of the direct fire emissions, fires accelerate permafrost degradation, which leads to greenhouse gas emissions for several decades. Their sum may be substantially larger than the direct emissions, yet is largely unknown. In addition, FireIce will investigate the relative contribution of CH4 from smoldering fires to fire emissions. CH4 emissions represent a small, yet not well known, fraction of carbon emissions from fires, but CH4 is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. FireIce will investigate feedbacks between climate warming and arctic-boreal fires by studying controls on fire size and ignition. Fire growth can be limited because of fuel or fire weather limitations. The fire weather control is sensitive to warming, which may lead to larger future fires. Lightning ignition is the main source of burned area in arctic-boreal regions, and more lightning is expected in the future. By combining contemporary controls on fire size and ignition, and future predictions of climate and lightning, FireIce will assess the vulnerability of arctic-boreal permafrost and soil carbon to increases in fire. FireIce’s results will be relevant to evidence-based policy. FireIce’s innovations are conceptual, i.e. unstudied aspects of an emerging warming feedback loop, methodological, e.g. inclusion of novel spaceborne data, and geographical, i.e. a focus on Siberia.