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.
Food system impacts of Covid-19
This research will examine the extent of continuity and dislocation in the supply chain across dairy products, meat, fresh fruit and vegetables, and fish. They will look at instances of radical changes in routes to markets and the barriers to change;...
Primary Topic: Trade & supply chains
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: D. Michael Winter
Countries
Understanding Society Covid-19 study
Understanding Society has launched a new monthly survey to look at the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the UK population. This has been funded by ESRC though the study’s discretionary budget and a £200k award from the Health Foundation. The ...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Michaela Benzeval
Countries
Tracking the Covid-19 crisis with high-resolution transaction data
Financial and payments systems throughout the world generate a vast amount of naturally occurring, and digitally recorded, transaction data, but national statistical agencies mainly rely on surveys of much smaller scale for constructing official econ...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Vasco M. Carvalho
Countries
Covid-19: burden and impact in care homes – a mixed methods study
The Covid-19 pandemic poses a substantial risk to elderly and vulnerable care home residents and Covid-19 can spread rapidly in care homes. We have national, daily data on people with Covid-19 and deaths, but there is no similar data for care homes. ...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Charities & volunteering
Lead investigator: Laura Shallcross
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
Welfare at a (social) distance: accessing social security and employment support during the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath
The benefits system is crucial to supporting people during, and after, the Covid-19 crisis but is under extraordinary pressure from an unprecedented wave of new Universal Credit (UC) applications. The benefits system therefore faces two significant c...
Primary Topic: Public spending, taxes & debt
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Lisa Scullion
Countries
Lockdown and voting behaviour: a natural experiment on postponed elections during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The goal of this paper is to study the impact of the lockdown policy on voting behaviour, during the Covid-19 pandemic. We focus on France, where a differential lockdown was implemented across departments, based on the local diffusion of the disease....
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
Lead investigator: Tommaso Giommoni
Countries
Where does work belong anymore? The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on working in the UK
The Covid-19 outbreak has forced companies to embrace home-based working (HBW) at such speed that they have had little opportunity to consider the impact on their workers. It can be argued that the crisis has led to the most significant, intensive so...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Abigail Marks
Countries
Covid-19 and crime in England
The Covid-19 outbreak has changed the landscape for both licit and illicit activities. This project addresses the impact of the crisis on the latter by examining its effect on crime and criminal outcomes in England. The effect is prompted due to chan...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Kriakos C. Neanidis
Countries
English longitudinal study of ageing Covid-19 substudy
The Covid-19 crisis is having an unprecedented impact on people's lives from the perspectives of their health, psychological wellbeing, social activity, employment and financial circumstances. Older people are at high risk because of the presenc...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Andrew Steptoe
Countries
Attitudes towards debt in corporate decision-making: evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
We study the e?ect of an entrepreneur’s attitude towards debt on the financial policies of the businesses they run. Using a survey of 1,009 Finnish SMEs, we test whether a manager’s attitude towards debt affects their likelihood of using debt-bas...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Mikael Paaso
Countries
Estimating the heterogeneous impact of Covid-19 on economic activity in Europe using high-frequency electricity market data
In response to the Covid-19 emergency, most countries introduced a series of social-distancing measures including lockdowns and businesses’ shutdowns. Therefore, official statistics indicate that virtually all developed economies experienced a sign...
Primary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
Lead investigator: Carlo Fezzi
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
The impact of lockdowns on socio-economic attitudes
We examine the immediate impact of the nationwide lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic on the socio-economic attitudes of our societies. Before and after the enforcement of lockdowns, we conducted large-scale surveys with 20,000 individuals in four...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Kerim Peren Arin
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
Covid-19: industry level origins of changes in economic welfare
We provide an analysis of how the decline in aggregate UK economic welfare caused by Covid-19 is related to industry-level measures of economic activity. By exploiting data on asset prices, we perform our analysis in real time. We find significant as...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Harjoat S. Bhamra
Countries
Moral suasion and the private provision of public goods: evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the Covid-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Moritz A. Drupp
Countries
Trade-offs in automated political advertising regulation: evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
Digital platforms have experienced pressure to restrict and regulate political advertising content. This paper presents evidence of unintended consequences of restrictions on political ads related to the Covid-19 pandemic. We use data on more than 30...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Grazia Cecere
Sustaining pro-social and environmental behaviours beyond Covid-19
Covid-19 has triggered a global economic shutdown, leading to unintended reductions in carbon emissions and other pollutants as a result of decreased travel and consumption. Although a global pandemic that has caused close to 400,000 deaths at time o...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Energy & climate change
Lead investigator: Roger Fouquet
Countries
The idiosyncratic impact of an aggregate shock: the distributional consequences of Covid-19
Using new data from the Understanding Society: Covid-19 survey collected in April 2020, we show how the aggregate shock caused by the pandemic affects individuals across the distribution in the UK. The survey collects data from existing members of th...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Michaela Benzeval
Countries
