Current Research
List viewEconomists from around the world are using real time data collection to better understand the impact the Covid-19 crisis is having on families, workers, firms and society, and how policies can help the recovery out of the crisis. Find out more about how these research teams are carrying out their projects, and what their findings are below.
Gemini Covid-19 study: immediate and longer-term impacts on the health, behaviour and wellbeing of U.K. families
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on U.K. families goes far beyond the devastating health implications of the virus itself. Added family stresses, including income loss, excessive confinement, social isolation and anxieties about health and educati...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Alison Fildes
Countries
Pandemic policing: public attitudes towards compliance and organisational resilience
The UK’s Covid-19 response has provided the police with new powers which potentially impinge upon civil liberties, altering the nature of policing activities. National policing bodies have encouraged a compliance not coercion approach based upon th...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Sarah Charman
Countries
Carrying the work burden of the Covid-19 pandemic: working class women in the UK
Working class women are carrying the burden of the extra physical and emotional labour being generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. These women care for children, sick and frail elderly, clean buildings, cook and serve food, administer institutions and ...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Tracey Warren
Countries
Centre for longitudinal studies
A nationwide survey of the participants of five national longitudinal cohort studies, to examine the impact of the pandemic, help understand how people at different life stages are affected, and how prior life experiences shape resilience or vulnerab...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Alissa Goodman
Countries
Facilitating the public response to Covid-19 by harnessing group processes
There is international recognition that effective response to Covid-19 is dependent upon the public acting collectively and for the common good. This is important in terms of adherence to preventative measures, which, especially for low-risk groups, ...
Primary Topic: Charities & volunteering
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: John Drury
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 restrictions on recreation and use of green space in Wales
The use of green spaces for recreation has acknowledged benefits for physical and mental health, to the extent of reducing mortality rates [1]. Green spaces include parks and gardens in urban areas, and the wider countryside in more rural settings. T...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Julia Jones
Countries
Child protection and social distancing: improving the capacity of social workers to keep children safe during the Covid-19 pandemic
This research will explore the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on child protection, social workers and service users, with specific reference to the novel use of digital technologies in a period of institutionalised social distancing.
Primary Topic: Charities & volunteering
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Harry Ferguson
Countries
The impact of the Covid-19 crisis on nutrition
A major challenge facing policymaking during the Covid-19 crisis is ensuring all households have access to a nutritious diet. The Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) have provided supermarkets with a list of 1.5 million vulner...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Martin O'Connell
Countries
The Covid-19 pandemic and working parents: evidence from Brisith longitudinal data
We document the difficulties faced by working parents during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the increased financial insecurity and worsening mental health due to conflicting family and work needs. We analyse the heterogeneous effects of the...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Zhiming Cheng
Countries
My home is my castle – the benefits of working from home during a pandemic crisis: evidence from Germany
This paper studies the relation between work and public health during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany. Combining administrative data on SARS-CoV-2 infections and short-time work registrations, firm- and worker-level surveys and cell phone tracking d...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Jean-Victor Alipour
Countries
Community health care and Covid-19 pandemic: experimental evidence from Uganda
The limited capacity of the health systems in many low-income countries, especially in rural areas, suggests that the rapid spreading of the Covid-19 virus could have huge consequences in those areas. On top of the direct impact of the virus, a growi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Martina Bjorkman-Nyqvist
Countries
Tracking the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of American households
Since March 10, 2020, we have been tracking effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on respondents to the nationally representative Understanding America Study (UAS). After an initial survey that covered March 10-31 March 2020, we launched tracking surveys ...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Arie Kapteyn
Countries
Promoting social distancing in a pandemic: beyond the good intentions
Reminders to promote social distancing have been ubiquitous throughout the Covid-19 crisis, but little is known about their effectiveness. Existing studies find positive impacts on intentions to comply, but no evidence exists of actual behavioural ch...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Paolo Falco
Countries
Partisanship and public health: early evidence from Belgium during the Covid-19 pandemic
We investigate how partisanship affects the authority of the executive branch by looking at the relationship between electoral support for the governing coalition and Covid-19 deaths across Belgian municipal districts. Applying spatial autoregressive...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Arthur Dyevre
Countries
Children’s education and use of time during the Covid-19 lockdown in France and Italy
The Covid-19 crisis has large impacts on the economy and these impacts are probably highly unequal among individuals and families. From a family perspective the lockdown situation is having a tremendous impact on two fundamental assets of families we...
Primary Topic: Schools, universities & training
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Hugues Champeaux
Living at the peak: health and public finance during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper provides novel evidence for the determinants of preferences for public health and the willingness to pay for health services using a survey experiment implemented during the third week of the lock-down in Spain. At the time of our experime...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Dirk Foremny
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 on violence against women and children in Germany
To contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly a quarter of the world’s population is currently under lockdown or practicing physical distancing. These measures may have inadvertent consequences. In this project, we study the implications o...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Cara Ebert
Countries
Restarting the economy while saving lives under Covid-19
We provide, calibrate and test a realistic model of the spread of SARS-Cov-2 in an economy where the population has different age groups and sectors. The model takes into account factors that have proved to be essential in explaining features of the ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Carlo Favero
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 lockdown on employment and mental health
Enforcing social distancing via economy-wide lockdown is considered as an effective measure to prevent transmission of the novel coronavirus Covid-19. Consequently, accompanied by a large number of job losses, a lockdown has severe labor market and e...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Kabir Dasgupta
Countries
The role of inter-temporal biases in influencing individuals’ demand for social distancing
We examine the economic determinants for social distancing in the context of Covid-19. Previous economics studies document the important role behavioral biases could play in inter-temporal decision-making. Viewing health in an inter-temporal framewor...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Plamen Nikolov
Countries
