Search and reallocation in the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from the UK

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK labour market has been extremely heterogeneous, with strong variation both by occupation and industrial sector. The extent to which workers adjust their job search behaviour in response to this reallocation of employment has an important bearing on the future course of the labour market. At […]

Is ‘employment during motherhood’ a ‘value changing experience’?

[…] motherhood change peoples preferences? We study whether the experience of employment during motherhood exerts an effect on attitudes towards gender norms, and more specifically, attitudes towards the impact of women’s employment on children’s wellbeing (which proxy traditional gender attitudes). Drawing on a large, representative and longitudinal data and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that […]

Covid-19 and financial hardship in London

Using UKMOD, the UK tax-benefit microsimulation model, we analyse the impact on Londoners of the Covid-19 crisis, of the emergency policies put in place since March 2020 and of some counterfactual policy options, including the continuation of the £20 weekly uplift in Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit. Our main results can be summarised […]

The psychological gains from COVID-19 vaccination: who benefits the most?

We quantify the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on psychological well-being using information from a large-scale panel survey representative of the UK population. Exploiting exogenous variation in the timing of vaccinations, we find that vaccination increases psychological well-being by 0.12 standard deviation, compensating for around one half of the overall decrease caused by the pandemic. […]

Broadband Internet and social capital

We study the impact of broadband penetration on social capital in the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits a technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access across households. The speed of a domestic connection rapidly decays with the distance of a user’s line from the network’s […]

Understanding Society Innovation Panel wave 13: results from methodological experiments

[…]   IP13 employed a web-first and telephone follow-up mixed-mode design, which differed from past waves but was necessitated due Covid-19. It also continued ongoing experiments on the impact of incentives, and as with prior waves, several other methodological experiments were included in the survey. Experiments were conducted on how to best collect contact information […]