How people connect with one another is a fundamental question in the social sciences, and the resulting social networks can have a profound impact on our daily lives. Blau offered a powerful explanation: people connect with one another based on their positions in a social space. Yet a principled measure of social distance, allowing […]

[…] schemes is to improve population health and to reduce emissions. There is considerable evidence on the latter, but relatively little on the former. This paper investigates the impact of mode choice on physical and mental health. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we exploit changes in mode of commute to identify health […]

[…] routinely performed by workers and any wellbeing impacts of commuting will consequently affect a large proportion of the population. This paper presents findings from analyses of the impact of commuting (time and mode) on multiple aspects of Subjective Well-Being (SWB), including: satisfaction with life overall and the SWB sub-domains of job satisfaction, satisfaction with […]

[…] in a continental European context. Although asset tests may be useful in singling out the more deserving of the poor, we know relatively little of their actual impact on eligibility and social outcomes in European welfare states. This paper looks at the prevalence and design of asset tests in European minimum income protection schemes. […]

[…] studies, but meta-regression analyses found no significant moderation effects for mean age, gender, continent, COVID-19 death rate, days of lockdown, publication status or study design. The psychological impact of COVID-19 lockdowns is small in magnitude and highly heterogeneous, suggesting that lockdowns do not have uniformly detrimental effects on mental health and that most people […]

Depression is the most common mental illness and its profound impact on cognition and decision‐making has implications for political judgement. However, those implications are unclear in the case of referendums offering a choice between status quo and change. On one hand, one component of depression is the kind of life dissatisfaction associated with voting […]

[…] post less, but only in the Innovation Panel. We use sentiment analyses of tweets to provide an example of how the amount of Twitter data collected can impact outcomes using these linked data sources. Results show that more negatively coded tweets are related to general happiness, but not the number of positive tweets. Taken […]

This article explores whether household debt has amplified the impact of the Covid crisis on the economy, and whether it might in future. We examine the impact of the crisis across different households, how they responded, and what implications this has had for household debt burdens so far.

[…] problems in the past has a particularly strong influence on the current financial situation and on the risk of eviction. The regional unemployment rate has an important impact on both the probability of having difficulties meeting housing costs and of eviction, highlighting the importance of the general economic climate in determining unsustainable housing commitments. […]

This paper presents evidence on the impact of the introduction of the National Minimum Wage using specially designed questions added to wave 9 of the British Household Panel Survey. New direct information on the basic hourly wage rate of hourly paid employees demonstrates the almost complete truncation and ‘spike’ at 3.60 GBP. The paper […]