Questions and answers about
the UK economy.

Current Research

List view

Economists 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.

Covid-19: supporting parents, adolescents and children during epidemics (Co-SPACE)

Covid-19 and the related public health measures have led to major disruptions to families’ lives, with different pressures arising for children, young people and their families over time. There is some indication from research during epidemics in o...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Polly Waite

Covid-19: monitoring the effects of the pandemic on illicit online trade.

The pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. Economic stress, the public health emergency and disinformation-driven panic have pushed customers, and vendors, towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Secondary Topic: Trade & supply chains
Lead investigator: Andrea Baronchelli
Countries

Covid-19: identifying effective remote literacy teaching methods for primary-aged children

This research project stems from a direct appeal from our UK teacher collaborators, who suddenly face having to teach pupils online, with scant training and patchy evidence on how to do so effectively. We aim to identify effective remote, evidence-ba...
Lead investigator: Manon 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

A duty of care and a duty to teach: educational priorities in response to the Covid-19 lockdown

This research explores the challenges the Covid-19 crisis sets primary schools, using surveys and telephone interviews to analyse how teachers weigh a duty of care (for their pupils’ well-being and welfare) and a duty to teach (given their responsi...
Lead investigator: Gemma Moss
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...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Abigail Marks
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...
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Lisa Scullion
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

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

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....
Secondary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
Lead investigator: Tommaso Giommoni
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

Economic narratives and policy ppinions: a survey experiment on Covid-19 stories

Narratives may impact people’s beliefs on relevant policy issues, and political context may mediate these effects. Indeed, some specific contexts may be more easily swayed by certain stories that provide explanations for current social and economic...
Lead investigator: Armenak Antinyan
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

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

Agreements must be kept? Residential leases during Covid-19

This paper studies how a Covid-19 lockdown affected residential lease payments. Survey data on 1511 Israeli renter households show nearly one in eight households not paying full rent during the lockdown, with these households holding back, on average...
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Itai Ater
Countries

The impact of Covid-19 on small business employment and hours: real-time estimates with homebase data

We use worker-firm matched data from Homebase to construct new real-time estimates of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on employment and hours worked of small businesses. We find four key results: (1) employment of small businesses in four of the ...
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Andre Kurmann
Countries

The effects of emergency government cash transfers on beliefs and behaviours during the Covid pandemic: evidence from Brazil

This project aims to evaluate the impact of emergency cash transfers on workers’ beliefs about the coronavirus. It focused on the impacts of ‘Auxilio Emergencial’, a cash grant provided to low-income households in response to income falls cause...
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

Small business under the Covid-19 crisis: expected short- and medium-run effects of anti-contagion and economic policies

During the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) crisis, governments around the world have implemented large-scale anti-contagion policies to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in combination with a series of economic policies to mitigate the econom...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Kohei Kawaguchi
Countries

Impacts of Covid-19 on rural households in Bangladesh

The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) is conducting a survey of rural households in Bangladesh to better understand Covid-19’s impacts on vulnerable people and guide the development of policy responses that improve social protection. This pho...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Peter Morgan
Countries