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There has been an increase in the use of registers and record linkages to study migrant mental health. However, the accuracy of these registers and the degree to which they are representative of the migrant population in Northern Ireland (NI) are unclear. The purpose of this paper is to explore: the coverage of the NI migrant population in general practitioner (GP) data and Census records; the issues faced by migrants in terms of registering and accessing the local health system; and the reporting of racial hate crimes against migrants to police.

Two focus groups of professionals (n=17) who worked with migrants were conducted. Group discussions were guided by a research-informed topic guide, and the data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Three main themes emerged: issues with the use of GP registration, Census and hate crime data for researching migrant mental health; barriers to health service use (e.g. low cultural awareness among health staff and access to interpreters); and risk factor exposure and mental health status in migrant communities (e.g. poverty, isolation and poor working conditions).

Record linkage and registry studies of migrant health and well-being using Census and health service sources need to be mindful of the likelihood that some migrants may be missed. The possible underrepresentation of migrants in health registers may be explained by reduced use of such services which may be caused my encountering staff with limited cultural competency and the inability to access an interpreter promptly.

Using aggregated data at the municipality level allows the authors to assess the role of relative deprivation (RD) – a measure of income inequality – on top of absolute income in shaping internal migration in Austria.

In this study, the authors analyse the effect of regional income inequality on emigration rates of Austrian municipalities using a unique spatial dataset that is constructed based on Austrian administrative register data. The register-based data contain information on the municipality of residence of all individuals aged 16 and over that have their main residency in Austria, as well as their income and socio-demographic characteristics.

The authors find that increases in relative deprivation in a municipality are related to higher emigration from the municipality. Allowing for heterogeneous effects across income, education and age groups reveals that the effect is stronger among those with comparably low levels of income and among low-skilled and young individuals.

The unique spatially disaggregated perspective is based on novel data from Austrian administrative registers, which comprehensively capture the economic situation and geographic movements of the whole Austrian population. Most importantly, this approach allows for measuring income inequality within local communities and for a direct identification of social groups that are more sensitive to inequality.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of unemployment on coronary heart diseases (CHD) in Italy on a sample of male manual workers in the private sector.

The authors investigate the association between CHD and different unemployment experiences (ever unemployed; short, mid and long cumulative unemployment), exploiting a large Italian administrative database on careers and health. The study design is based on the balancing of individuals' characteristics during a 12-year pre-treatment period; the measurement of unemployment occurrence during a seven-year treatment period; the observation of CHD occurrence during a five-year follow up. The workers characteristics and the probability of receiving the treatment are balanced by means of propensity score matching. Standard diagnostics on the balancing assumption are discussed and satisfied, while the robustness to violations of the unconfoundedness assumption is evaluated by a simulation-based sensitivity analysis.

The authors find a significant increase of CHD probability was found among workers who experience more than three years of unemployment (relative risks (RR)=1.91, p<0.1), and among those who exit unemployment starting a self-employment activity (RR=1.70, p<0.1). Using different selections of the study population, a clear pattern emerges: the healthier and more labour market attached are workers during pre-treatment, the greater is the negative impact of long-term unemployment on health (RR=2.79, p<0.01).

The very large representative sample (n=69,937) and the deep longitudinal dimension of the data (1985-2008) allowed the authors to minimize the risks of health selection and unemployment misclassification. Moreover, the adopted definition of unemployment corrected some undercoverage and misclassification issues that affect studies based on a purely administrative definition and that treat unemployment as a unique career event disregarding the duration of the experience.

Information and communication technology (ICT) support of corporate accommodation processes with real estate data is not a simple subject. Insight is required into the primary processes of very different organisations, and inclusion of many aspects of portfolio management is necessary. This paper highlights possibilities for ICT support of these complex processes, although it does not explore in detail the different technology products available on the market. Instead, an overview of considerations focused at possible functionalities is provided which may contribute to sound decision making on actual development, purchase and implementation of supporting systems. To an increasing degree business support systems function in a network or are ‘webenabled’. Also transactions are frequently effected using new infrastructures (e‐commerce, business‐to‐business [B2B], etc). New technologies are also rapidly gaining ground in demand and supply chains regarding corporate accommodation, real estate and portfolio management. In many cases, though, the need for an overall and ‘future proof’ vision when applying them in a corporate real estate (CRE) environment is not thoroughly recognised. With regard to the Government Buildings Agency (GBA) in the Netherlands, it is important to bear in mind that this is not a commercial organisation. It functions in the public domain, and therefore there are aspects that must be specially treated. The paper presents a survey of important matters in GBA’s primary (and partially secondary) processes, and establishes connections with possibilities (and implications) that state‐of‐the‐art ICT support may provide. A conceptual outline of the primary processes of a CRE organisation is used as a starting point, and an overview of the data needs in these processes is given. By explicitly applying an approach aimed at (potential) data customers, who will decide for themselves what data has informative value, functional boundaries in internal processes are easily crossed. From this approach, many possibilities for added value, marketing and B2B communication become more obvious and manageable. Although this paper focuses on the primary process of the GBA in the Netherlands, many subjects may be applicable in other CRE organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the earnings, employment and income effects of job displacement among female assistant and auxiliary nurses – two hard-hit female-dominated occupations – in Sweden during the economic crisis of the 1990s.

Using register data, assistant and auxiliary nurses who were displaced due to mass-layoffs during the crisis years were identified, as well as an appropriate control group. The study population could be followed for a maximum of 13 years. Mean effects were estimated using a propensity score weighted fixed effect estimator. In a supplementary analysis, propensity score weighted quantile effects were estimated.

Job loss among women in the public sector seems to have had similar earnings and employment consequences as previously found for job loss among men in the private sector. However, the social insurance system replaced a majority of the lost earnings. Moreover, a distributional analysis revealed that the income and earnings losses were limited to the lower part of the distributions.

Budget consolidation measures to restore health to public finances in the aftermath of the Great Recession are likely to have long-lasting adverse consequences for some. Although many of those losing their jobs are likely to quickly regain employment at a comparable earnings level, the unlucky few may bear most of the costs.

The author is aware of no previously published research that has investigated either the impact of job displacement in the public sector or the distributional effect of job displacement.

Do female police recruits drop out of police education and/or leave the profession more often than men, and has this changed over time? Can gender differences be explained by the background characteristics and family obligations of the recruits?

This paper employs administrative registry data covering all individuals admitted to the police academy (1995–2010, N = 6570) and all academy recruits employed in the Norwegian police (1992–2014, N = 7301). The paper analyses the data using discrete-time logistic regression and coarsened exact matching.

The levels of dropout and attrition are generally low. However, female recruits have a somewhat greater tendency both to drop out of education and to leave the force. The gender differences are quite stable, although the percentage of female recruits has risen sharply. Family obligations do not seem to explain female attrition from the police force.

Because women tend to leave the police more often than men, further research is suggested in investigating female police recruits’ experiences. However, the relatively low level of dropout and limited gender differences also provide a reason to question whether stories of the police as a male-dominated profession not adapted to women are valid across time and in different settings.

This study provides exhaustive and detailed longitudinal data not previously available in studies of police careers. This study also tracks attrition in a period that has involved both increased numerical representation of women and changes in police culture, while accounting for other observable differences between male and female police officers. Contrary to common explanations, there is limited importance of family obligations and altered gender composition.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of part-time work on absolute wages. The empirical focus is wages and working hours in three selected sectors within private services in the Danish labour market – industrial cleaning, retail, hotels and restaurants – and their agreement-based regulation of working time and wages. Theoretically, this analysis is inspired by the concept of living hours, which addresses the interaction between working hours and living wages, but adds a new layer to the concept in that the authors also consider the importance of working time regulations for securing a living wage.

The paper builds on desk research of collective agreements and analysis of monthly administrative register data on wages and working hours of Danish employees from the period 2008-2014.

This analysis shows that the de facto hourly wages have increased since the global financial crisis in all three sectors. This is in accordance with increasing minimum wage levels in the sector-level agreements. The majority of workers in all three sectors work part-time. Marginal part-timers – 15 hours or less per week – make up the largest group of workers. The de facto hourly wage for part-timers, including marginal part-timers, is relatively close to the sector average. However, the yearly job-related income is much lower for part-time than for full-time workers and much lower than the poverty threshold. Whereas the collective agreement in industrial cleaning includes a minimum floor of 15 weekly working hours – this is not the case in retail, hotels and restaurants. This creates a loophole in the latter two sectors that can be exploited by employers to gain wage flexibility through part-time work.

The living wage literature usually focusses on hourly wages (including minimum wages via collective agreements or legislation). This analysis demonstrates that studies of low-wage work must include the number of working hours and working time regulations, as this aspect can have a dramatic influence on absolute wages – even in cases of hourly wages at relatively high levels. Part-time work and especially marginal part-time work can be associated with very low yearly income levels – even in cases like Denmark – if regulations do not include minimum working time floors. The authors suggest that future studies include the perspective of living hours to draw attention to the effect of low number of weekly hours on absolute income levels.

Performance pay is growing in importance. Even in a centralised economy such as the Norwegian economy, the prevalence of performance pay has increased significantly from 1997 to 2003, and internationally changes in payment methods also occur increasingly. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how performance pay and team organisation and the interaction between these affect publicly‐financed sickness absences of workers.

Standard panel and cross‐section non‐linear and linear regression techniques are applied to Norwegian panel register and questionnaire data on private sector workers and workplaces during 1996‐2005.

Team organisation and performance pay are found to be negatively related to sickness absence incidence rates and sick days, partly due to strong negative relationships in workplaces providing jointly performance pay and team organisation. The negative effect of performance pay on sickness absence survives even when fixed job effects are taken into account. The negative effects were stronger for weak incentives than stronger, and they are primarily related to group‐based incentive schemes.

Introducing weak group‐based incentive schemes might be one way to successfully tackle absenteeism for firms.

The paper's findings contribute to the growing literature on how performance pay and team organisation affect absenteeism.

We estimate the parental investment response to the child endowment at birth, by analysing the effect of child birth weight on the hours worked by the mother two years after birth. Mother’s working hours soon after child birth are a measure of investments in their children as a decrease (increase) in hours raises (lowers) her time investment in the child. The child birth endowment is endogenously determined in part by unobserved traits of parents, such as investments during pregnancy. We adopt an instrumental variables estimation. Our instrumental variables are measures of the father’s health endowment at birth, which drive child birth weight through genetic transmission but does not affect directly the mother’s postnatal investments, conditional on maternal and paternal human capital and prenatal investments. We find an inverted U-shape relationship between mothers worked hours and birth weight, suggesting that both low and extremely high child birth weight are associated with child health issues for which mothers compensate by reducing their labour supply. The mother’s compensating response to child birth weight seems slightly attenuated for second and later born children. Our study contributes to the literature on the response of parental investments to child’s health at birth by proposing new and more credible instrumental variables for the child health endowment at birth and allowing for a heterogeneous response of the mother’s investment for first born and later born children.