The prospects for the next generation—whether young people, regardless of their backgrounds, have equal chances of social success—pose a momentous problem for modern societies. Inequality of opportunity, often reflected by social immobility, is a threat to the egalitarian promise and the...

User data fuel the digital economy, while individual privacy is at stake. Governments react differently to this challenge. Estonia, a small Baltic state, has become a role model for the renewal of the social contract in times of big data. While e-governance usage has been growing in many parts...

Trust is a good approach to explain the functioning of markets, institutions or society as a whole. It is a key element in almost every commercial transaction over time and might be one of the main explanations of economic success and development. Trust diminishes the more we perceive others to...

This work examines the economic benefits of learning a new skill from a different domain: cross-skilling. To assess this, a network of skills from the job profiles of 14,790 online freelancers is constructed. Based on this skill network, relationships between 3,480 different skills are revealed...

Digital technologies are radically transforming our work environments and demand for skills, with certain jobs being automated away and others demanding mastery of new digital techniques. This global challenge of rapidly changing skill requirements due to task automation overwhelms workers. The...

The uniqueness of human labour is at question in times of smart technologies. The 250 years-old discussion on technological unemployment reawakens. Prominently, Frey and Osborne (2017) estimated that half of US employment will be automated by algorithms within the next 20 years. Other follow-up...

Aiming to explain the European divide with respect to social and political values, scholars in the past have relied on a simplified four- (or even two-) dimensional regime model which tranches the continent according to the social capacities of its inhabitants. This "cartography" of "Social...

In light of increasingly "smarter" technologies, the future of (human) labour is questioned on a daily basis. A study by Frey and Osborne (2013), one of the most recognised contributions in this domain, estimated that half of the US labour force is highly susceptible to computerisation in the...

Today’s technology allows firms to personalise their interaction with consumers to an unprecedented degree, leading to an ever finer-grained segmentation of consumers. Targeted online advertising and online price discrimination are amongst the most salient examples of this development. While...