COVID-19 vaccination intentions and subsequent uptake: An analysis of the role of marginalisation in society using British longitudinal data.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has previously been modelled using data on intentions - expressed prior to vaccine availability. Once vaccines became widely available, it became possible to model hesitancy using actual vaccination uptake data. This paper estimates the determinants of the joint distribution of COVID-19 vaccination intentions (declared before the release of any vaccine) and actual vaccination take-up (when it was widely available across the age distribution). We use high quality longitudinal data (UK Household Longitudinal Study) collected during the pandemic in the UK, merged to a wide variety of individual characteristics collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our estimation draws on pre-Covid values of variables for a sample that includes 10,073 observations from the September 2021 wave. The contribution of this paper is to model hesitancy and uptake jointly. The work shows that people who might be regarded as marginalised in society (measured, before the pandemic began) are less likely to say that they intend to be vaccinated and they go on to also be more likely to actually remain unvaccinated. It also shows that there is a large positive correlation between the unobservable determinants of intention and of uptake. This high positive correlation has an important implication - that information campaigns can be reasonably well profiled to target specific groups on the basis of intention data alone. We also show that changing one's mind is not correlated with observable data. This is consistent with two explanations. Firstly, the new information available on the arrival of vaccines, that they are safe and effective, may be more optimistic than was originally assumed. Secondly, individuals may have been more pessimistic about the effects associated with infection before vaccines became available.

Have girls been left behind during the COVID-19 pandemic? Gender differences in pandemic effects on children's mental wellbeing.

Using data from the UK, we show that girls have been affected more than boys by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing. These gender differences are more pronounced in lower-income families. Our results are consistent with previous findings of larger pandemic effects on mental health of women.

Determinants of the community mobility during the COVID-19 epidemic: The role of government regulations and information.

This paper studies the dynamics of human mobility during the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries around the world. The main goal of the analysis is to empirically separate voluntary reductions in mobility driven by the information about the location-specific pandemic trends from the effects of the government-imposed social distancing mandates. Google human mobility dataset is used to track the dynamics of mobility across a wide range of categories (e.g., workplace, retail and recreational activities, etc.), while information on country-specific counts of COVID-19 cases and deaths is used as a proxy for the information about the spread of the pandemic available to the population. A detailed index of stringency of the government-imposed social distancing policies in around 100 countries is used as a measure of government response. We find that human mobility does respond in a significant way to the information about the spread of the pandemic. This channel can explain about 15 percentage points of the overall reduction in mobility across the affected countries. At the same time, our results imply that government-imposed policies account for the majority of the reduction in the mobility observed during this period.

Working parents, financial insecurity, and childcare: mental health in the time of COVID-19 in the UK.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the policy measures to control its spread-lockdowns, physical distancing, and social isolation-have 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 related to the situation of working parents who now have to manage competing time demands across the two life domains of work and home. We show that the deterioration of mental health is worse for working parents, and that it is strongly related to increased financial insecurity and time spent on childcare and home schooling. This burden is not shared equally between men and women, and between richer and poorer households. These inequalities ought to be taken into account when crafting policy responses.