This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments' policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit EU countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare resilience at the onset of the pandemic, by creating counterfactual scenarios using the European tax-benefit model EUROMOD combined with COVID-19-related household surveys and timely labor market data. We find that income poverty increased in all countries due to the pandemic while inequality remained broadly the same. Differences in the impact of policies across countries arose from four main sources: the asymmetric dimension of the shock by country, the different protection offered by each tax-benefit system, the diverse design of discretionary measures and differences in the household level circumstances and living arrangements of individuals at risk of income loss in each country.

Ghana and South Africa proactively implemented lockdowns very early in the pandemic. We analyze a three-wave panel of households in Accra and Greater Johannesburg to study the mental and economic well-being of the urban poor between the COVID-19 lockdown and the "new normal" one year later. We find that even if economic well-being has mostly recovered, life satisfaction has only improved slightly and feelings of depression are again at lockdown levels one year into the pandemic. While economic factors are strongly correlated with mental health and explain the differences in mental health between South Africa and Ghana, increasing worries about the future and limited knowledge about the pandemic (both countries) as well as deteriorating physical health (South Africa) and trust in government (Ghana) explain why mental health has not recovered. Therefore, we need broad and country-specific policies, beyond financial support, to accelerate the post-pandemic recovery of the urban poor.

We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid-19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however, individual investors started buying heavily, parallel to market recovery. The cross-section shows large differences as young, educated, high income, and risk tolerant investors are net buyers throughout and, thus, benefit from the stock market recovery. Older individuals, parents of young children, and individuals affected by adverse liquidity shocks from Covid-19 are net sellers. Given the high risk of illness, older people are hit by dual blows to both health and finances.

Measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 affected some workers' capability to work and hence earning more than others. The initial impact may have been mitigated, for instance by relying on savings and assets, but access to these buffers likely varied within and across countries. In this article we estimate COVID-19 potential earnings losses using the Lockdown Working Ability Index and relate this to households' savings and assets observed in the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey. We find that, without government support, households in the Euro Area could only offset on average half of their losses by relying on liquid assets and almost half would deplete their savings in doing so, although there is significant cross-country variation. When considering the effect of income support policies, liquid assets cover on average 65 percent of the remaining losses and still 20 percent would exhaust their liquid assets on average in the Euro Area.

We use data from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden over the course of 2020. Policy responses are measured by the Stringency Index and the Economic Support Index from the Blavatnik School of Government. Stringency is systematically associated with lower life satisfaction, controlling for the intensity of the pandemic itself. This stringency effect is larger for women, those with weak ties to the labor market, and in richer households. The effect of the Economic Support is never statistically different from zero.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a huge surge in deposits, although little is known about how this was distributed. This paper overcomes the lack of timely micro-data on households' liquidity by looking at supervisory data, introducing a new method to estimate the trend in liquidity distribution and the percentage of liquidity-poor households. We find that in 2020 there was a decrease both in the degree of deposit inequality among Italian households and in the share of liquidity-poor households, alongside government support measures that allowed some households at the bottom of the liquidity ladder to save out of their declining income. The increase in households' liquidity improved their ability to repay debts, and this could help spending patterns to rebound once confidence about the economic outlook is restored. Despite this, households with insufficient liquidity buffers still constitute a large share of population, making their debt repayment capacity dependent on the strength of the economic recovery.

Excess mortality is a more robust measure than the counts of COVID-19 deaths typically used in epidemiological and spatial studies. Measurement issues around excess mortality, considering data quality and comparability both internationally and within the U.S., are surveyed. This paper is the first state-level spatial analysis of cumulative excess mortality for the U.S. in the first full year of the pandemic. There is strong evidence that, given appropriate controls, states with higher Democrat vote shares experienced lower excess mortality (consistent with county-level studies of COVID-19 deaths). Important demographic and socio-economic controls from a broad set tested were racial composition, age structure, population density, poverty, income, temperature, and timing of arrival of the pandemic. Interaction effects suggest the Democrat vote share effect of reducing mortality was even greater in states where the pandemic arrived early. Omitting political allegiance leads to a significant underestimation of the mortality disparities for minority populations.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Zealand's official statistical agency (Stats NZ) moved quickly to supplement the quarterly Household Labour Force Survey with wellbeing measures from the General Social Survey. The first supplement (June 2020) began toward the end of a restrictive national lockdown. Subsequent quarterly surveys continued through a second lockdown for the Auckland region, enabling tests of regional lockdown impacts. Survey measures include questions on life satisfaction, health, income adequacy, social capital (trust), and loneliness. Published aggregated data indicate that life satisfaction, social capital, health, and financial wellbeing were each higher through the pandemic (in 2020) than prior to it, including for disadvantaged groups, but loneliness rose. Analysis of the individual-level data, confined to the within-pandemic period, however indicates that more restrictive lockdowns were associated both with reduced life satisfaction and greater loneliness, with differing impacts according to labor market and household status.

In March 2020, the International Comparison Project published its latest results, for the calendar year 2017. This round presents common-unit or purchasing-power-parity data for 176 countries on Gross Domestic Product and its components. We review a number of important issues, what is new, what is not new, and what the new data can and cannot do. Of great importance is the lack of news, that the results are broadly in line with earlier results from 2011. We consider the relationship between national accounts measures and health, particularly in light of the COVID-19 epidemic which may reduce global inequality, even as it increases inequality within countries. We emphasize things that GDP cannot do, some familiar-like its silence on distribution-and some less familiar-including its increasing detachment from national material wellbeing in a globalized world where international transfers of capital and property rights can have enormous effects on GDP, such as the 26 percent increase in Ireland's GDP in 2015.

Most explanations of the recent political upheavals in Egypt since 2011 include a reference to rising inequality, but the usual indicators of income inequality in Egypt do not support that inequality was on the rise prior to the uprisings. In this paper we provide measures of inequality of opportunity in wages and consumption for Egypt at different points in time from 1988 to 2012 that shed light on the gap between popular perceptions and measured indices of inequality. Our findings indicate that although measures of inequality of wage income have increased over time in Egypt starting in 1998, the share attributable to circumstances declined steadily throughout the whole period. We attribute this decline to the fact that outcomes for individuals from a middle class background have moved closer to the outcomes of those from a poor background. The outcomes for those from privileged backgrounds remain quite apart from the rest.

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". Lower happiness inequality is found both between and within countries, and between and within individuals. Our cross-country regression results argue that the extension of various public goods helps to explain this greater happiness homogeneity. This new stylised fact arguably comes as a bonus to the Easterlin paradox, offering a somewhat brighter perspective for developing countries.

Precautionary saving is the additional saving done by individuals to protect them financially in situations of uncertainty and reduce their vulnerability for negative shocks that may affect their consumption levels. This paper investigates the existence and extent of savings motivated by precaution in Mexico for people aged between 50 and 75, using data from the Mexican Health and Ageing Study 2003. The empirical strategy is based on a test of the direct relationship between the accumulated wealth and the uncertainty generated by the social security status, in particular the availability of health insurance, accounting also for the expectation to receive a retirement pension. The endogeneity-corrected estimates do not yield results that unequivocally support the existence of private savings as a risk protection mechanism, implying that the public protection system has an important role in reducing the vulnerability of the population studied.

We construct and compare three distinct measures of household asset wealth that complement traditional income- or expenditure-based measures of socioeconomic status. We apply these measures to longitudinal household survey data from China and demonstrate that household asset wealth has been increasing over time, a theme consistent with many previous studies on the process of development in China. Unlike other studies that have shown rising income inequality over time, however, we show that asset wealth inequality has actually been declining in recent years, indicating widespread participation in the benefits of economic reforms. Furthermore, the evolution in the cumulative distribution of household welfare is such that social welfare has been increasing with the passage of time, despite rising inequality in the early years of the survey.

We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence.

The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioral frictions. Undersaving can have important welfare consequences: variable consumption, low resilience to shocks, and foregone profitable investments. We lay out five sets of constraints that may hinder the adoption and effective usage of savings products and services by the poor: transaction costs, lack of trust and regulatory barriers, information and knowledge gaps, social constraints, and behavioral biases. We discuss each in theory, and then summarize related empirical evidence, with a focus on recent field experiments. We then put forward key open areas for research and practice. D12, D91, G21, O16.

We show that body mass increases with economic resources among most Southern Africans, although not all. Among Black South Africans the relationship is non-decreasing over virtually the entire range of incomes/wealth. Furthermore in this group other measures of "success" (e.g., employment and education) are also associated with increases in body mass. This is true in both 1998 (the Demographic and Health Survey) and 2008 (National Income Dynamics Survey). A similar relationship holds among residents of Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, and Namibia. This suggests that body mass can be used as a crude measure of well-being. This allows us to examine the vexed question in South African labor economics whether there is involuntary unemployment. The fact that the unemployed are lighter than the employed, even when we control for household fixed effects, suggests that they are not choosing this state.

Recent economic research on international comparisons of subjective well-being suffers from several important biases due to the potential incomparability of response scales within and across countries. In this paper we concentrate on self-reported satisfaction with income in two countries: The Netherlands and the US. The comparability problem is addressed by using anchoring vignettes. We find that in the raw data, Americans appear decidedly less satisfied with their income than the Dutch. It turns out however that after response scale adjustment based on vignettes, the distribution of satisfaction in the two countries is essentially identical. In addition, we find that the within-country cross-sectional effect of income on satisfaction-a key parameter in the recent debate in the economic literature-is significantly under-estimated especially in the US-when differences in response scales are not taken into account.