Welcome!

I am a sociologist (Utrecht University, 2022) currently employed as a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW)/RUG. This PhD-project is supervised by Frank van Tubergen, Jelle Lössbroek, and Kène Henkens and funded by Netspar (theme grant 2022-02).

My research focus is primarily on the migrant pension penalty: the higher poverty rates and lower pension incomes migrants experience upon retirement. In the Netherlands, about 40 percent of the non-Western retired migrants live below the poverty line compared to 6 percent of Western migrants and ‘only’ 3 percent of the non-migrant retirees. As this group of retired migrants is expected to grow at an unprecedented rate the coming decades, it is crucial to explain this stylized fact.

Methodologically, I study these migrant pension penalties employing a combination of research methods. I reviewed the literature in a systematic way, leading to a comprehensive overview of the literature and a research agenda. Moreover, I qualitatively interviewed retired non-Western migrants to identify how they prepared for their retirement and how they cope with their precarious financial position.

Currently, we work on the quantitative part of the project: we link individual migrants from several large nationally-representative surveys to their individual register data. This allows us to study the migrant pension penalty in a comprehensive and dynamic way. In addition, we collect new survey data allowing us to study how migrants prepare for their future retirement.

Feel free to contact me in case you would like to collaborate or if you want to learn more about the migrant pension penalty.