Predicting children’s emotional and behavioral difficulties at age five using pregnancy and newborn risk factors: evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study

Childhood emotional and behavioral difficulties have a profound impact on later life outcomes, making it crucial to identify early-life risk factors that predict emotional and behavioral difficulties. However, much of the existing research has concentrated on diagnosing, rather than predicting, emotional and behavioral difficulties, and has often focused on adolescents rather than younger children. […]

Survey mode change by necessity: evaluating survey dataset performance in a global pandemic

[…] been occurring in surveys pre-pandemic, but at a slower pace and not to the same extent. Hence, these design changes were made with limited information on their impact on dataset performance in terms of non-response bias risks and bias risk causes: variation in population sub-group non-response. This paper investigates the extent to which information […]

Automation and political realignment: the impact of ‘losers’ occupational trajectories on core political values

[…] support for the radical right. In this article, we investigate whether this political realignment is mirrored by a change in individuals’ core political values. We test the impact of different occupational trajectories of the automation ‘losers’ on their socialist-laissez faire and libertarian-authoritarian values using long-run panel data (BHPS 1991–2008). Furthermore, we test the mediating […]

Annual report on trends in panel attrition in Understanding Society, 2025 edition

[…] the differential attrition might result in biased survey estimates. The analysis reported in this paper describes the evolution of panel attrition in Understanding Society, focusing on the impact of attrition in the samples that form the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a longitudinal survey that started in 1991 covering the household population of Great […]

The value of pets: the quantifable impact of pets on life satisfaction

[…] find that a pet companion increases life satisfaction by 3 to 4 points on a scale of 1 to 7. Moreover, we estimate the size of the impact of pets on human life satisfaction and wellbeing in monetary units. We find that having a pet companion is worth up to £70,000 a year in […]

The wage impact of immigration into the UK after the Great Recession

[…] the wages of native UK workers in the decade after the Great Recession and before the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. It provides new evidence on the wage impact of immigration in the UK from 2009 to 2020. On balance, the evidence suggests that fears about adverse consequences of rising UK immigration have been unfounded, […]

Returns to testosterone across men’s earnings distribution in the UK

[…] individuals as instrumental variables following a Mendelian Randomization approach to address the endogeneity of testosterone levels. Our findings show that higher testosterone levels have a strong positive impact on earnings. Importantly, these findings are limited to men belonging to the lower quartile of the testosterone distribution and working in higher-paid jobs. We show that […]

Returns to testosterone across men’s earnings distribution in the UK

[…] individuals as instrumental variables following a Mendelian Randomization approach to address the endogeneity of testosterone levels. Our findings show that higher testosterone levels have a strong positive impact on earnings. Importantly, these findings are limited to men belonging to the lower quartile of the testosterone distribution and working in higher-paid jobs. We show that […]