Björn de Kruijf (p), Arjen Edzes, Jouke van Dijk, Sietske Waslander

Ana Patricia Fanjul Alemany

Automation, digitization, and robotization continuously change the work we do (Frey & Osborne, 2017; Koster & Brunori, 2021). Additionally, demographic changes, like aging and migration, require a change of work. Therefore, knowledge and skills need to constantly improve (Midtsundstad & Nielsen, 2019). These developments cause a need for all individuals to keep developing themselves throughout their careers.

Similarly, a company that barely innovates is doomed to go bankrupt in the long term and national economies need innovation too (Heraty, 2004). Constant innovation in products, production processes, and consumers is necessary and cannot only be done by an R&D department (Lomineishvili, 2021). It also requires employees to be able to adapt to new techniques and processes. The question is then how you organize this effectively and efficiently. Crucial to this is that employees are convinced that they need to continue developing and are motivated to continue to invest in their development. To do this, a positive learning culture is necessary for a company so that both employees and the organization continue to develop themselves.

Instinctively, lifelong development has a relationship with the learning culture in an organization. Harris (2007), notes that there is no research on whether companies with a positive learning culture are better in motivating their employees for lifelong development and whether these companies invest more. That gap is filled with this research. In this paper, we draw upon existing definitions of learning culture within companies and connect that to investments in lifelong development. We investigate the different components of learning culture, like the attitude towards learning within an organization, the role of managers, and the relevance of feedback and reflection. Additionally, we investigate how these components affect investments in lifelong development.

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between learning culture and the investments in lifelong development by the organization. To do so, first, a framework is developed on how learning culture and lifelong development exactly relate. Then a newly conducted survey is used to test this framework. This survey was sent to 6500 companies with at least 5 employees in the north of the Netherlands of which 671 replied. In the survey, we asked about the investments in schooling in the past 12 months and define learning culture based on 8 questions allowing us to do this research.

Ana Patricia Fanjul Alemany (p), Liliana Herrera, María F. Muñoz-Doyague

Björn De Kruijf

The difficulties of entrepreneurship and business development in rural areas has long been a topic of both academic and policy interest. This has given rise to a variety of EU, national and regional program aimed at levelling the playing field for firms and entrepreneurs operating in challenging regional settings. We analyze one of such programs that has been considered particularly promising: Community-Led Local Development. We analyze the effect of this approach, based on empowering local communities, upon rural municipalities of Spain. To do so, we have constructed a novel dataset with information on over 12.6 million beneficiaries, aggregated at a LAU 2 level. In order to avoid bias in our estimation arising from multiple time periods and relevant covariates, we employ the recent Difference-in-Difference estimator developed by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021). The analysis renders important insights regarding both the effect of the policy and the possible increase of disparities across gender in rural areas. The policy succeeds reducing unemployment in the municipalities that received aid, but the estimates also show considerable difference in the causal effect for women and men. For female workers, the policy is not as successful as for male workers. Further research is needed to ensure that the policy does not inadvertently widen the gender gap present in rural labor markets.