We analyze how shutdown policies affected unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use proxy data from Google Trends to disentangle the effects of six policies. State-level policies caused 12.4% of unemployment insurance claims early on. Restaurant limits and non-essential business closures had modest effects. Other policies (e.g. stay-at-home orders, school closures) had no additional effect.
In this observation, we use data from an online survey of parents with school-aged children – funded by the Nuffield Foundation and collected during June and July 2020 – to document the patchwork of in-person schooling that children had before the summer. We also explore parents’ concerns about sending their children back to school at the end of the last term.
The COVID-19 crisis is increasing councils’ spending and reducing their incomes. This report analyses councils’ forecasts of these pressures and potential policy responses.
On Monday, the government performed a dramatic U-turn on how A Level grades are assigned to students this year. The most pressing issue now is what will happen to university places.
This paper combines novel data on the time use, home learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time User Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown.
Prior to the crisis there was no gap in the average amount of time spent learning between children from better and worse off families, but during the lockdown a sizeable gap emerged.
We characterize inflation dynamics during the Great Lockdown using scanner data covering millions of transactions for fast-moving consumer goods in the United Kingdom. We show that there was a significant and widespread spike in inflation.
Interest in the issue of career progression has been growing, fuelled by a decade of stagnant productivity and pay growth (even before the COVID-19 crisis) and concerns that changes in the labour market – such as the casualisation of work in the gig economy – are making it harder for some groups to progress.
In this report, we use a novel source of real-time data on households’ finances from Money Dashboard, a budgeting app, to explore the impacts of the crisis so far on earnings, incomes and financial distress, and how they are evolving. We complement this with household survey data to explain and verify the key trends.
The spread of COVID‐19, and international measures to contain it, are having a major impact on economic activity in the UK. In this paper, we describe how this impact has varied across industries, using data on share prices of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, and how well targeted government support for workers and companies is in light of this.
Reports indicate the government is considering a temporary cut in VAT to stimulate consumer demand, possibly targeted at sectors such as tourism and restaurants. Overall the case for a temporary VAT cut now is mixed. It could provide an important fillip to consumer demand if implemented under the right conditions. Its expiration must be carefully timed so as not to choke off a nascent recovery.
This report examines how living standards – most commonly measured by households’ incomes – were changing in the UK up to approximately the eve of the current COVID-19 crisis, using the latest official household income data covering years up to 2018–19.
In 2019, the employment rate among 25- to 64-year-olds in the UK reached 80% – the highest on record, and considerably higher than the 76% rate recorded shortly before the Great Recession.
