Laura Silva, PhD at Sciences Po - OSC, join to Franco Bonomi Bezzo (University of Milan, La Stalate)  and Marteen van Ham (Delft University of Technology and University of St Andrews, Scotland) have just published a paper on PLOS ONE:  "The combined effect of Covid-19 and neighbourhood deprivation on two dimensions of subjective well-being: Empirical evidence from England". This peer-reviewed paper is available in open access.

The spread of the pandemic offers new opportunities to investigate the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and well-being. There is
growing evidence that Covid-19 has exacerbated existing spatial inequalities.

Authors investigate the combined effects of the Covid-19 crisis and living in U.K. deprived neighbourhoods on two dimensions of subjective well-being: hedonic (i.e. mental health) and evaluative (i.e. life satisfaction) subjective well-being.

Their starting hypothesis is that individuals who live in more deprived neighbourhoods, which tend to be more densely populated with smaller houses and overall less desirable living conditions, have experienced the effect of the pandemic more severely than those living in less deprived areas.

They use data from Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which began in 2009 and covers over 100,000 individuals from around 40,000 households in the UK. In addition, they designed specific surveys for understanding the changing impact of the pandemic on the welfare of UK individuals.

A complex statistical analysis with a set of cross-sectional Ordinary Least Squares regressions and a fixed effect difference-in-differences model is fully described in the paper.

Among the results: for those living in more deprived neighbourhoods the level of hedonic well-being decreased more than for those living in better areas. But there is no such difference for evaluative well-being. Before the Covid-19 lockdown both hedonic and evaluative well-being measures were strongly negatively correlated with neighbourhood deprivation, but the restrictions imposed during the lockdown have had a different effect on the two correlations.