We provide new evidence on the mental health and healthcare utilisation impacts of the rollout of Universal Credit, one of the most significant welfare reforms in Europe in recent decades. Designed to simplify the benefit system and strengthen work incentives by merging six meanstested...

Purpose and scope: This analysis assesses the cumulative impact of the Autumn Budget Statement 2025 on UK residents over the period 2026-2030. The Budget has been passed by Parliament and will be implemented beginning in April 2026. This report models policy impact on the UK population using...

We estimate daily wage rates for skilled and unskilled construction workers and agricultural laborers in Switzerland from 1750 to 1860, a period of profound political and economic transformations. Our analysis is based on 17,700 newly collected wage quotes from primary sources and 23,300 price...

The government is in the process of conducting a review of universal credit (UC), the main means-tested benefit for working-age people, received by 6.3 million families at any one time. This report discusses some of the challenges UC faces, and outlines potential directions for reform.

The Welsh Government aims to increase employment and earnings as part of its 'Plan for Employability and Skills', and in order to help generate additional tax revenues that can help fund public services and investment. It also aims to reduce inequalities in employment and earnings, and has clear...

The Scottish Government aims to increase employment and earnings as part of its 'National Strategy for Economic Transformation' and in order to help generate additional tax revenues that can help fund public services and investment. It also has ambitious targets to significantly reduce poverty,...

Revealed preference theory (RPT) and its behavioral extension (BRPT) underpin an important strand of welfare economics. Their normative appeal rests on the claim that welfare can be inferred from observed behavior without substantive assumptions about what agents should value - a property I call...

Time poverty is a key yet conceptually contested dimension of household living standards. Both univariate and bivariate measures remain debated because there is no clear consensus on how to define and quantify socially necessary unpaid work, the time that money cannot substitute for, across...

Many previous studies conclude that population aging leads to an increase in consumption or income inequality. The results are based on a conventional model that analyzes compositional effects given interage differences in the means and variances of income. These issues are addressed in this...

We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries from 2009-2019 at both the individual and country levels to revisit the relationship between income and subjective wellbeing. Our inspiration is the paradox first proposed by Easterlin (1974), according to which higher incomes are associated...

This study examines the effect of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests in Iran during the last quarter of 2022 on individual life satisfaction. To assess this impact, we use two original representative surveys conducted before and after the protests in 2022. The repeated cross-sectional dataset...

How do minimum wages affect informality? We study the near-doubling of the real minimum wage from 2000 to 2009 in Brazil, where 46% of the workforce is informal. Using labor force surveys covering the informal sector, we show the minimum wage exhibits near full passthrough to informal employees...

Amid escalating climate risks and uneven decarbonization trajectories, understanding the distributional determinants of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is essential for guiding Asia toward equitable and sustainable development. Anchored in the Environmental Kuznets Curve framework and the...

Obtaining comparable poverty estimates over time is critical for monitoring poverty trends and informing effective poverty reduction policies. Yet hardly any developing countries could construct consistent poverty trends over extended time periods due to changes to the consumption survey...

"Background to the study and data Basis: - The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a massive refugee movement since February 24, 2022, with mostly women and children fleeing to European countries, including Germany. Around one million people from Ukraine have now been living in Germany for...

Understanding the complex and multidimensional nature of poverty is essential for designing effective and targeted policy interventions in rural Ethiopia. This study examined the determinants of multidimensional poverty in Bilate River Basin in South Ethiopia, employing cross-sectional household...

The Lao economy faces increased challenges from currency depreciation and high inflation. Economic recovery from COVID-19 has been gradual, undermined by macroeconomic instability and external factors. The combination of the need to service large external debts, high import prices, and limited...

Over the last decades, the United States has experienced a large increase in, both, income inequality and living standards. The workhorse models of optimal income taxation call for more redistribution as inequality rises. By contrast, living standards play no role for taxes and transfers in...

Utilising the EU-SILC modules 2009, 2014, and 2021, this note analyses child-specific material deprivation in the EU Member States. Besides the statistics on the most frequently lacked items, the child-specific material deprivation intensity (i.e., the number of lacked items) and the...

Prior studies assessing welfare across countries have utilised measures that combine country-level outcomes in income and life expectancy (or average lifespan). However, this perspective remains blind to the fact that two countries may have the same life expectancy or average income but very...

This report summarizes the findings from a survey on sustainable livelihoods of refugees in Rwanda. The survey was designed to assess the living conditions, economic status, and overall well-being of refugees, and structured around the indicators included in a self-reliance measure for refugees...

As Asia faces the dual challenges of rapid economic expansion and mounting environmental pressures, the region's ability to balance growth with sustainability has become a focal point of global discourse. With increasing energy demands, escalating CO₂ emissions, and widening income inequality,...

Brazil has committed to a 43 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 2005 and 2030 - mainly through increasing the share of sustainable biofuels and clean energy in the energy mix, and through forest restoration and reafforestation. Sustainable investments in the forestry...

This paper examines the evolution of the biological standard of living using anthropometric data from approximately 22,000 Swiss mercenaries born between c. 1725 and c. 1865. Analyzing mercenary data presents two key challenges: left-truncation due to height requirements and potential selection...