Dr W. Salverda (1947) has been named Professor by Special Appointment of Labour Market and Inequality in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The chair was designated on behalf of the Political Economy Foundation (Stichting Politieke Ekonomie) and is affiliated with the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS).

Wiemer Salverda is a labour economist with a macro focus and a particular interest in the institutional environment – as shaped by factors such as wage negotiations, the minimum wage, legislation on dismissal, the education system and so on – and in international comparison and in long-term trends. His research focuses mainly on wage distribution from the ‘bottom’ to the ‘top end’ in the framework of the mechanisms driving the economy and labour market. Specific themes in his work are the immense change in the role of younger participants in the labour market and vast growth in the number of part-timers and two-income households. He has done extensive research into youth unemployment, older employees, low-wage employment and the effects of the Dutch consensus, or ‘polder’, model. Currently he is studying the effects of labour market competition on work and income among the less educated, how the education levels of household partners (homogeny) impact wage inequality, and the relationship between public and private-sector incomes. Salverda’s teaching activities will forge a link between his work as chair and his research at the AMCIS.

Salverda is the director of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS), which he joined in 2000. In the 25 years prior to that, he was a member of the Economics Faculty at the University of Groningen. At present, he is in charge of coordinating the international Growing Inequalities’ Impacts (GINI) research project, set up to analyse the drivers of inequality and study the social, cultural and political consequences of inequality in 29 countries. From 1996 until 2008, Salverda coordinated the European Low-wage Employment Research network (LoWER), which was responsible for a large body of publications. Salverda’s work has appeared in such international academic journals as Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Journal of the European Economic Association, International Labour Review and Applied Economics. He is also the leading editor of the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality and has served as an adviser to the OECD, ILO, European Commission and the English Low Pay Commission.