Financial resilience of two-worker households from a health perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the significant impact of health conditions on household finance. Traditional measures of financial resilience ignored households' ability to adjust to labor income disruptions. We proposed a more comprehensive two-tier measure of financial resilience by accounting for nonlabor income and spending adjustments in the face of income loss associated with health situations. Using this measure, we evaluated the financial resilience of two-worker households with members having COVID-19 health risk conditions and other mental and physical chronic diseases. Our findings showed that households with cancer patients were more financially resilient yet those having obese members were less financially resilient. Decomposition of the financial resilience measure revealed differences in financial resources allocation-households with cancer patients allocated more wealth to noncash financial assets, whereas households with obese members saved less and spent more. Our findings shed light on financial planning practices and public policies of emergency assistance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Pushing or clicking the grocery cart? Health and economic concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Online Grocery Shopping (OGS) has grown dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unknown, however, how consumers weighed pandemic situational factors versus household production considerations of timesaving and cost. We collect and analyze survey data from a nationally representative sample to examine how consumers with different health and socio-demographic profiles consider these factors for OGS choices and how their choices changed in the first seven months of the pandemic. We find that consumers with moderate-to-high income, white, having insurance, and not in the labor force value the timesaving and convenience of OGS more than pandemic situational factors. Still, some consumers with health risks choose to shop in person because of the cost of OGS. Lung disease, diabetes, mental health conditions, age, income, and college degree explain the dynamics of OGS choice as the pandemic evolved. Our findings shed light on the development of technology-assisted adaptation to future public health emergencies.

U.S. Household Financial Vulnerability: Prediction Analyses in the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this article, we projected household financial vulnerability in the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a nationally representative sample of households from the 2017 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we analyzed potential changes in financial status in the pandemic resulting from loss of income and savings from discretionary consumption. We provided a ranking of household groups by their financial vulnerability and the first estimate of the number of households at various degrees of financial vulnerability. Our study showed that a substantial part of the universal stimulus payments was made to households that had sufficient income to cover basic needs and those saved by reducing discretionary expenses. For the most financially vulnerable, the first one-time stimulus payment was too little and too late to help with their financial difficulties. Our findings shed light on to whom and in what form the US government should direct financial assistance during the pandemic.

Quantifying COVID-19 importation risk in a dynamic network of domestic cities and international countries.

Since its outbreak in December 2019, the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has spread to 191 countries and caused millions of deaths. Many countries have experienced multiple epidemic waves and faced containment pressures from both domestic and international transmission. In this study, we conduct a multiscale geographic analysis of the spread of COVID-19 in a policy-influenced dynamic network to quantify COVID-19 importation risk under different policy scenarios using evidence from China. Our spatial dynamic panel data (SDPD) model explicitly distinguishes the effects of travel flows from the effects of transmissibility within cities, across cities, and across national borders. We find that within-city transmission was the dominant transmission mechanism in China at the beginning of the outbreak and that all domestic transmission mechanisms were muted or significantly weakened before importation posed a threat. We identify effective containment policies by matching the change points of domestic and importation transmissibility parameters to the timing of various interventions. Our simulations suggest that importation risk is limited when domestic transmission is under control, but that cumulative cases would have been almost 13 times higher if domestic transmissibility had resurged to its precontainment level after importation and 32 times higher if domestic transmissibility had remained at its precontainment level since the outbreak. Our findings provide practical insights into infectious disease containment and call for collaborative and coordinated global suppression efforts.