The original goal of the Finnish experiment of 2017 and 2018 was to try to get some evidence on how a new social policy instrument mimicking a basic income would work and what kind of behavioral consequences it would have. The realized experiment was restricted to people aged 25–58 already receiving a labor market subsidy or unemployment allowance and a total of 2,000 participants were randomly selected to receive a basic income payment of €560 per month.
Olli Kangas is Director of Equal Society research programme at the Academy of Finland and Professor of Practice at the Department of Social Research, University of Turku. Previously he has been the Director of Governmental Relations (2015-2018) and Research Director (2007-2014) at KELA, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. His research interests revolve around comparative analysis of social policy systems, their causes and consequences in terms of macro-economy, income distribution and legitimacy of social institutions. Olli Kangas was scientific planner and leader of of the research group evaluating the Finnish experiment.
Michael C. Burda is Professor of Economics, School of Business and Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research and teaching interests are in labor economics, macroeconomics and European integration. He is the author of Macroeconomics: A European Text (Oxford University Press), now in its 7th edition and translated into 12 languages.
Jürgen Schupp is currently Senior Research Fellow at the DIW Berlin. He was Director of Research Unit Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 2013 until end of 2017. Since September 2013, Jürgen Schupp has held the position of Full Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin.
Themen: Arbeit und Beschäftigung , Ungleichheit