Covid-19 and the measures taken to contain it have led to unprecedented constraints on work and leisure activities, across the world. This paper uses nationally representative surveys to document how people of different ages and incomes have been affected across six countries (China, South...

Unlike most countries, Korea did not implement a lockdown in its battle against COVID-19, instead successfully relying on testing and contact tracing. Only one region, Daegu-Gyeongbuk, had a significant number of infections, traced to a religious sect. This allows us to estimate the causal...

We examine self-reported productivity of home workers during lockdown using survey data from the UK. On average, workers report being as productive as at the beginning of the year, before the pandemic. However, this average masks substantial differences across sectors, by working from home...

Mental well-being has declined during the Covid-19 pandemic in several developed countries, and particularly in the UK. Given the resurgence of the disease in western Europe during autumn 2020 and concurrently increasing restrictions, we investigate the possible effect on well-being of a winter...

Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? Revisiting the literature, we find that the gradient is reduced by 30-45% by fine-grained personality facets and Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five...

Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? Revisiting the literature, we find that the gradient is reduced by 30-45% by fine-grained personality facets and Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the policy measures to control its spread – lockdowns, physical distancing, and social isolation – has coincided with the deterioration of people's mental well-being. We use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to document how this phenomenon is...

We estimate intergenerational health persistence in the United Kingdom using Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), a broad measure of health derived from the SF-12 Survey. We estimate that both the rank-rank slope and the intergenerational health association (IHA) are 0.21. We use components of...