COVID-19

The dynamics of inequality: what have we learned?

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In the final episode of the DIAL podcast we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives and what its longer term consequences might be. We’re joined by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen from the University of Turku in Finland. Elina is the Scientific Coordinator for DIAL and, as the programme draws to a close she reflects on some of the programme’s highlights,  key findings and implications for the future.  

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this final episode of the series, we’re delighted to be joined by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen, from the University of Turku in Finland. Elina is the scientific co-ordinator for DIAL and today, as the programme draws to a close, she’s here to reflect on some of the program’s highlights, key findings and implications for the future. So welcome, Elina thank you very much indeed, for joining us. Now, first of all, I’m guessing it’s been no mean feat and indeed, I know, it’s been no mean feat, keeping an eye across 13 fantastic research projects with researchers based all over Europe. But just take a minute or two, if you would to remind us of what exactly the DIAL programme is and what it’s involved over the last few years.

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  0:57 

So thanks a lot, Chris. The DIAL programme is, as you said, kind of transnational programme. And we’ve had 13 research projects involved. And all of those involve international collaboration. And it’s based in the social sciences and behavioural sciences, financed by NORFACE, which is a research organisation bringing together different funding institutes across Europe. And so the focus of DIAL has been on inequality and in particular inequality across the life course and trying to understand some of the structures of inequality cross nationally and some of the mechanisms kind of producing inequality and and what that means to people and societies as a whole.

Christine Garrington  1:41 

Wonder if I can ask you why it has been so important to look not just at inequality, per se, as you were saying there, but at how inequality manifests itself over the life course, because this is an important thing, isn’t it? And indeed how, when and where it sort of accumulates?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  1:57 

Inequality is a really complex and multifaceted issue. And so I think one one part of it is that inequality comes across in many different domains. So it’s important to take into account inequalities, for example, in education, labour market, health, and so on. And then I mean, to really understand where it comes from and what it means it’s important to look at the determinants across time, I mean, both across time for an individual and their parents, and so on, kind of that life course aspect, but also, for countries to see how it develops across time. Inequality isn’t something that just is, I mean, it develops. And so kind of building on that kind of developmental process to really kind of inform us about how we can do something about it, or how we can really kind of understand where it comes from, it’s important to take that into account.

Christine Garrington  2:58 

Now, you talked about the programme largely being based in the social sciences. But one of the key things about the project is that we’ve seen researchers from different disciplines as well as different countries coming together to try to tackle, as you say, as you rightly say, this incredibly complex area around inequality, what’s been the thinking there?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  3:20 

Well, I mean, inequality is something that interests a lot of academics working in different disciplines. And, and they come from it from from kind of different angles. And I think, because it is kind of a complex issue, and it’s an issue that kind of manifests itself in different ways. So really building on on the strengths of different disciplines, I think is a key key strength here. So we don’t only look at inequality in one domain, for example, say, say something like education, which would then be kind of a subset of disciplines that tend to be interested in inequality in education, but also how education is linked to inequalities in in other aspects and, and in addition to the kind of different domains that come from different disciplines, also, the ways in which we, we analyse it and building on the strengths and knowledge of different disciplines. I think is key here, key to, to just building a comprehensive picture and learning from each other, as well as as then taking that knowledge forward.

Christine Garrington  4:34 

It would be remiss of us not to talk about COVID. And in some ways, it was something of a setback for plans to to stage events and meetings around the the programme of research to get the word out there about it. But it also provided in some respects, a rather unexpected opportunity, didn’t it to use the programme to look at inequality in the context of COVID. So, so tell us a bit about that.

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  4:58 

Yeah, so obviously the research programme began before COVID. And so the projects had their their kind of plans of what they wanted to do and the analysis that they were going to do. But given this massive impact that COVID had on on society and and on inequality as well. A lot of projects then decided that this would be a really important aspect to look at and an opportunity also to learn about inequality in a changing societal context. So different projects have taken this into account in different ways. But for example, there’s been kind of really important work on on just what happened to inequality for example, due to lock down and and the economic upheaval of COVID, not just the health implications, but then also using that upheaval, to think about how inequalities might be changed. And for example, so work by Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez, Suzanne Harkness and Anette Fasang, looking at what happened to housework, during COVID. People were having to stay at home, both parents and children and seeing what happens to inequalities between men and women. And how the, the the number and age of children influences that and kind of what they saw was that obviously, this change in in family habits changed house work habits, but at the same time, when locked down ended a lot of couples returned to normal. So so even though there was a massive shift, and and people behaved differently for a short period of time, we can see that these kind of entrenched habits, then then go back to normal quite quickly.

Christine Garrington  6:43 

Yeah, really interesting piece of work that so. And also, despite COVID, you were able to, nevertheless, to involve a great number of stakeholders in in the research, what messages did you receive from them, I wonder about what was emerging?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  6:58 

So yeah, we’ve had some really interesting discussions with stakeholders, both policymakers and then kind of non-governmental organisations involved in both practical work and lobbying as well. And they’ve been really interested in in the work that we’re doing. So in particular, we’ve talked to stakeholders involved in kind of gender inequality work, and how participation in the labour market is unequal between men and women, and in particular, between mothers and fathers. And then we’ve also talked a lot to stakeholders involved in kind of childhood disadvantages, and how different types of children are put at a disadvantage. And what are some of the mechanisms kind of potentially either alleviating those disadvantages, or that are currently making those disadvantages larger, and that would kind of be important to look at. So we’ve kind of talked both about the the bigger picture of inequality, but also some of the mechanisms and obviously, stakeholders are, are often interested in what they can do. And then we’ve also had really good discussions about especially with policymakers also about the kinds of data that going forward, would be needed to, to kind of really analyse these things further. And I think there’s a lot of kind of shared interest in collecting data or making administrative data available for researchers to be able to address inequalities in the future.

Christine Garrington  8:28 

Yeah, now a major part of your role, Elina has been to pull together all of these different strands of work in some way to ensure that we get to a, what we hope is a coherent picture of what’s been learned from the programme as a whole. And I wonder whether it’s possible in the short period of time that we have to say what has been learned from the programme as a whole?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  8:48 

Well, that’s no mean feat. To then kind of say what’s been learned because I think there’s such richness in the research coming through and I mean, we’ve only kind of touched upon some of the aspects just now. And so we what we’ve been trying to do is, is bring together kind of thematically, things we’ve learnt in terms of, for example, gender inequalities, as I just mentioned. So So really looking at further at kind of motherhood, penalties and how, how those might be potentially for example, by by further training ameliorated although at the same time, we need to remember that women tend to nowadays have higher education levels than men. So education isn’t always the key here. So also looking at kind of gender and sexual minorities, even though we’ve been making progress in terms of legislation and policy. The discrimination can still be kind of an ongoing issue for people and and kind of the legacy of the past is still a major issue for for LGBT citizens across Europe and even though legislation has progressed a lot to still the practices in terms of, of workplaces or educational institutions aren’t aren’t really catching up necessarily, to such a large extent. And then moving on to kind of a different area, I think there’s been a lot of really interesting work in terms of, of the role of genetics, which is a big new area of research in terms of social sciences, and how that plays into the reproduction of inequalities across generations and over the life course, and how that changes depending on the environment that people live in. So, so we’re learning a lot about so called gene environment interplay, and which is obviously kind of something that social scientists are really keen to look at is the the environmental aspect of, of how genes play out. So so we’re learning a lot about the fact that genes aren’t our destiny as such, but but the the context or the environment matters a lot for that.

Christine Garrington  11:00 

Yeah, lots of really fascinating and very, very innovative work that’s going on in that area, for sure. Now, you’re talking about stakeholders a moment ago, you’ve been responsible also for helping to ensure the dissemination of this research to to those non-academics as well as other researchers. So I’m interested to know and I think others will be interested to know what sorts of resources there are available. For those interested to know more, aside from the obviously, the dozens, and I know, there are dozens of journal articles and working papers that have have been produced if you’d like for the scientific community. But what else is there.

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  11:34 

Starting from those journal articles, I think we’ve tried to make a kind of effort to make those more accessible in terms of both bringing them all to our website, but also providing summaries that are not just the academic abstract. So even looking at the journal articles, starting from from summaries that are more accessible to everyone involved, and not just researchers in those fields, I mean, abstracts can sometimes be a bit difficult to disentangle. Then bringing together the research we’ve we’ve been producing policy briefs that, I mean, obviously are aimed at policy audiences but I think those bring together thematically some of the research as well in a really nice way. So those are available on the on the website, then obviously, this podcast series, I think is has been a great way of disseminating the research. In addition to that, so we had our final conference last autumn. And some of those videos from the presentations are available still through the website. I mean, there’s both recordings of presentations that bring together entire projects, but also kind of individual, more finely specified research topics. But But in particular, there’s there’s videos of researchers presenting their whole project at the final conference. So I think those are also a great resource.

Christine Garrington  12:57 

Yeah, indeed, a wonderful library of materials that people can dip into at their leisure and really catch up on and get to grips with the important things that have emerged from this, this work. So finally, Elina, the ultimate aim of a programme like this is obviously to improve our understanding and knowledge on the one hand and influence change for the good with the understanding on the other. And I wonder if you’re able to say how, I know it’s very difficult, but if you can say how all this important work might feed into the thinking and policies of those seeking to reduce inequalities today, and in the future?

Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  13:32 

At the same time as advancing academic knowledge, we definitely have wanted these research results to be relevant for policymakers and to reach policymakers and indeed, kind of other organisations interested in in these types of inequalities and processes. I mean, on the one hand, there has been really great comparative work on the kind of institutional influences that policies in different countries have and I think that’s a really important thing to draw from in terms of, for example, education policy, or family policies for work life balance and the gender inequality in pay so, so looking at the across national differences and comparing countries and then learning from that. But then also, I mean, there’s been really detailed work into kind of the mechanisms of inequality and more specific interventions for example, and how those influence inequality and and then really digging more deeply into how inequality is reproduced and what we might be able to do about that. So for example, work on on parenting and how that reproduces inequalities among children and and then thinking about well, how we might be able to to provide more equitable parenting for children and what we can do about that. So I think there’s, there’s been work on multiple levels that hopefully we’ll be able for policymakers to draw on in terms of developing these things in the future.

Christine Garrington  15:07 

Thanks to Elina Kilpi-Jakonen, DIAL’s scientific co-ordinator for joining us for the final episode of this fourth series of the DIAL podcast. You can find all the resources that Elina mentioned in this episode on the DIAL website at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. We hope you enjoyed this episode, which is produced and presented by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts. And don’t forget to subscribe wherever you find your podcasts to access all our earliest series.

A level playing field for children: why it matters in tackling inequality over the lifecourse

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In Episode 5 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast we’re in conversation with Andreas Peichl, Professor of Macroeconomics and Public Finance at the University of Munich and Principal Investigator of a DIAL project looking at the impact of childhood circumstances on individual outcomes over the life-course (IMCHILD). 

Tackling inequalities in adolescence and working life

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In Episode 3 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast, we are in discussion with Richard Blundell. Richard is the Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL, director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the principal investigator of a DIAL project looking at human capital and inequality during adolescence and working life. In this episode we explore the work done by this project tackling inequalities in adolescence and working life.

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this episode, we’re delighted to be joined by Richard Blundell, David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL, and director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Richard is also the principal investigator of a DIAL project, looking at human capital and inequality during adolescence and working life. So welcome, Richard, thank you very much for joining us today.

Richard Blundell  0:40 

Thank you, Christine.

Christine Garrington  0:41 

I wonder if you can just start by telling us a little more specifically what this project has been investigating and why.

Richard Blundell  0:48 

Yeah, I’d be delighted to. What we’re looking at in this project is the evolution of inequality through adolescence and working life. Relating to the education streams, people choose how it affects their outcomes going forward into working life, what happens during working life, what kind of training seems to work, what routes to better jobs are for people who don’t, for example, go to higher education, university. Whether training can offset some of the gender gaps that we’ve been seeing opening up in the labour market, and whether choices in higher education matter for future labour market outcomes. So it’s very much about not the early years of school – there’s another project looking at that, that runs in parallel with our project, similar investigators, we’re working together with them. What we’re looking at here then is from adolescence onwards, and how the inequality evolves during adolescence and working life.

Christine Garrington  1:58 

So one area of focus has been women and work really very, very interested in in this, you’ve looked at the gender pay gap, the role of childcare, on women’s ability to return to work, and indeed, on the role of job training, among other things. So what would you say for you are the key things to have emerged from this particular area of work Richard?

Richard Blundell  2:18 

Yes, this is obviously absolutely central, the kind of pay gap between men and women and how it opens up through working life is something that’s been really hard to tackle and getting behind this, what are the drivers of it, and how to address it is really key to solving some of the most important inequalities that we see in working life. We’re working with researchers, mainly economists, and education researchers in Norway, in the UK and in France. That’s rather good, because those three countries have rather different systems of routes through education, into work, and different opportunities for women and men as they progress through their working life. And we wanted to understand what those differences could tell us about the gender pay gap. And therefore what policies could be perhaps most useful in addressing the gender pay gap.

Christine Garrington  3:25 

There are a couple of key things to come out of this one there.

Richard Blundell  3:28 

Some of its, you know, in some sense, pretty obvious. That is that work experience is really important for pay and for earnings as you go through your career for career progression. And of course, when children come along, women spend a fair amount of time not in work, perhaps still in employment on maternity leave, but not actually gaining the work experience that turns out to be so important in career progressions. We’ve kind of known that. But it’s become really acute, even part-time work is really not sufficient for women to keep up at work with their male colleagues. There are two kind of routes to addressing this. One is to provide good quality childcare, that can have two major benefits. One is it can provide good quality inputs and care for children, which is particularly important, especially in disadvantaged families. But it can also allow women to spend more time at work and developing their career profiles. There’s also a very large importance of mothers and fathers spending time with their children. And so when children come along, it’s kind of inevitable, really, that work may take second place, and that there’ll be less time engaged in work experience in progression. And remember, it’s exactly these years in the 20s and early 30s, where all the big career progression is made in working life, and women really fall behind there. So an alternative we’ve been looking at, and it turns out to be rather interesting is to work instead of on work experience, but on the human capital itself, once women come back into work.

Christine Garrington  5:25 

So what might that look like in reality, then Richard?

Richard Blundell  5:27 

So you can imagine the following scenario, a woman or a man, but unfortunately, it’s particularly typically, the woman who takes time off, once she returns to work, you can imagine her engaging in a training programme, and that can make up some of the loss. Well, we weren’t that optimistic about that to begin with. But we’ve become more optimistic for two reasons, particularly in the UK and in Norway. In Norway, using the Population Register, we can follow people, right the way through their working careers, we can follow the whole of the Norwegian population. It’s an exhaustive data set on everything everybody does – their qualifications, where they’re working, their family structure, and so on. And what we found is that it’s particularly successful for women to who’ve had a child early on in their career to return to some kind of schooling qualifications, and that can have a big boost to their career profiles and address some of the gender gaps that occur. In the UK it turns out similarly, women who returned to work spend quite a bit of time in training. And we found that that training, work related on the job training, it has to be accredited, and it has to be work related, those things have a payoff. And we feel that there’s real room for improving this type of training. It’s all part of designing education and training routes, during your working career, that work much better than the ones we currently have. And boy in in the UK, we’ve been training way behind in the organisation of formal routes into education and training through your working life, especially for those who don’t go to university.

Christine Garrington  7:29 

Now, I want to move on to talk about COVID. And obviously, although not expected when your project began, the pandemic, obviously, as well as being a terrible thing for us all did provide, however, what I’m guessing was quite a fascinating and important opportunity to look at the impacts of COVID on on people’s lives in this context of inequality. So what did you, what did you get to focus on there?

Richard Blundell  7:52 

Once we were into the first major wave of COVID, it was clear that it was going to exacerbate a lot of the inequalities during adolescence, during education and during working life, let alone health of course. The longer run impact that we’re seeing is on learning – the loss of learning, the loss of school time, the loss of engagement in learning, because of being not able to go to school, those children from deprived families have had much, much more learning loss over this period, than the privilege than children in more privileged families. It suddenly became clear that space was really important. But for learning for children, it was absolutely critical. If children didn’t have a quiet place with good digital access, a good setup for engaging in online classes, then that already put them behind behind. And there’s many studies showing there’s a huge gradient in space, in digital access, in access to these kinds of technologies across the income and and socio economic gradient. Losses have been extremely large, up to half a year of schooling loss for many, many children. The second point is that if you’re at home with educated parents, who are working from home and still have time to interact with you, you’re going to get that input from them. schooling is the great equaliser. It puts children from deprived backgrounds in an environment where they can learn perhaps things that they couldn’t learn at home. And that was taken away. The work on Norway and France shows exactly the same there. So learning loss, huge. This doesn’t usually happen in recessions by the way. This was very, very specific to COVID.

Christine Garrington  9:55 

And what about when you looked at matters related to work.

Richard Blundell  9:58 

All on the job training, apprenticeships just didn’t happen. In fact, for those in their early careers, you know – 18, 19, 20 – there was an almost complete end to apprenticeships. Apprenticeships fell back by 70% or more for that younger group, exactly the group that I was mentioning before. It’s vital that we get this on the job, accredited training, because they’re the ones not going to university, those going to university have been served rather better. I know from my experience here that we’ve at UCL, we’ve been keeping online classes and activities going at a pretty high level, actually. And the kind of students that we have here, can engage in that quite fully. But that’s very different for a student who didn’t make it to university, and who’s trying to gain their experience and training through apprenticeships, there’s just been no engagement. So this loss of learning has been huge.

Christine Garrington  11:11 

I’m interested to know whether women were worse affected than men in this context?

Richard Blundell  11:16 

We thought it might affect women more but in fact, overall in employment and what have you, it’s been pretty neutral in the UK, that’s just because of the structure of industry we have here. But it hasn’t been neutral at home. We’ve seen, of course, mothers and fathers both having to do more childcare, because schools have been closed during lockdown, or children have been at home during self-isolation, even in periods without lockdown. But mothers of taken, have borne the brunt of the childcare at home, we followed women and families in surveys throughout COVID. And found that although childcare activities have increased for both male and female parents, there really has been an extra load on women. And again, that’s going to affect their careers, and other aspects of their life going forwards. All those things that we were concerned about before COVID. And that were the absolute centre of this project have all become all the more heightened through COVID. And I think the policy recommendations that have come out of this project are very, very relevant for the post COVID world that we’re now entering.

Christine Garrington  12:41

Yeah, I wonder how how easy it has been? Or how difficult I guess it’s probably the better question to to feed those recommendations in such a fast moving event that COVID has been and, you know, was it possible for that to feed through all of those findings, all of those important things into the policy sort of making cycle in order to try to mitigate some of those impacts? Or, or was that that must have been very challenging.

Richard Blundell  13:09 

For policy makers, at least civil servants have been very open, of course, to try and to figure out what’s been going on. And remember, the initial policy responses, at least on simple measures of inequality have been remarkably successful. You know, we haven’t ever had a recession, really, where there’s been so much support thrown into the economy, of course, we’re gonna have to pay for that. But some of the short run impacts, I think were mitigated, what we’ve focused on here, are the longer run ones, you know the the loss of learning, the loss of training, the loss of work experience, they’re not showing up even yet, they’re going to show up in the next few years. And it’s critical, we have an opportunity now to address them. And there is a lot of interest across the whole policy world, and government and around the world. In addressing this. In fact, as part of this project, we fed into the G20 meetings last year in Rome, and a major part of our work was used to suggest a kind of coordinated approach to designing the best interventions now to address what’s been going on with loss of education, and loss of work experience and training across more or less the whole developed world.

Christine Garrington  14:27 

Really great to hear that there’s been such an appetite for findings like these important findings to feed into policy, but I guess the devil is in the detail, right?

Richard Blundell  14:37 

Unfortunately, these are gonna have to be huge programmes. And the thing about huge programmes is that they can be hugely expensive and not necessarily very effective. We need to get this right. We need to get these education interventions and these training interventions done in the most efficient and effective way. And that’s where we can learn from other countries that do at least some things better, some things worse, we’re all learning from each other. And this project which brought in, you know, Norway, which has a pretty effective system of education and training right across the board, not just for those going to university, which is where we tend to focus. And France, which has, again, a very different system. So we can learn, we can learn from that. But yeah, I see a long impact of COVID, not just long COVID. But it’s hidden a bit at the moment, by the way, because of the uptick in the economy. You know, there’s quite a demand for certain types of jobs, as you’d expect, when there’s, you know, we’re coming out of a big, big recession like that, but I’m pretty sure that that’s hiding these big losses, they will turn up over time. So yeah, there’s, there’s a big hunger for this. We’re feeding a lot of a huge amount and working a lot with Department of Education here with the Treasury on what what should be done with other policy groups. And similarly in Norway, and France.

Christine Garrington  16:08 

Now, I know we’ve talked about the labour market a bit, but I wonder whether there’s anything else that you really would like to stress about that side of things, because this was a major part of your work?

Richard Blundell  16:19 

We had to invent things on the hoof and everyone was involved in that the furloughs remember, the furlough system didn’t exist. In fact, in the UK, and in many other economies, we’ve not, we’ve not been particularly good at providing general what one might call social insurance. That is, if people fall on hard times get reduced earnings, you know, do we make up the difference? At least in the in the shortish run, we don’t particularly do that very well, in the UK, we target very low incomes. We have a very targeted universal credit and benefit system. So it does prop up incomes at the bottom. And it does that actually quite well. Not always administratively perfectly, but it does it. But if you look at someone who’s on a kind of lower middle income, which is the group that really was hit during COVID, there’s very little support for them. Universal credit doesn’t do a great job, it just doesn’t replace their incomes – the furlough system did it replaced 80% of their income. And, and it was very successful in doing that, to the extent that as I said, you know, income falls and inequality increases didn’t happen in the way they often do during recessions. So in that sense, these policies have been very successful. On the downside, you know, they’re the things I mentioned, they’ve been very good at short run income support, at least for for many groups. But they’ve not been very good yet at addressing these losses in, in human capital investments. And work is about two things. It’s about earning money today. And it’s about in investing in skills that will earn you even more, or give you a better career profile, at least in the future. And it’s those longer term investments that I feel, or a fear of being really left to one side.

Christine Garrington  18:17 

I wonder whether you’ve seen anything that relates to how these inequalities manifest in respect of where people live, where they come from, is there something around place that’s quite important as well?

Richard Blundell  18:28 

We kind of knew there were geographical differences and differences by family background, it just, you know, we can see that in workings of our society. But I didn’t realise how big they were. And I think it’s been quite a shock to us. It’s not surprising, you know, that the emphasis now is on levelling up, at least it’s suggested it is in education is very important. What we found in this research, you know, looking at how well people do at school, and then into university, if they go there, and then into work is really striking, you know, some areas of the UK, for example, and this would be true in other economies as well, by the way, very few children actually make it to university. Take areas like Grimsby or Skegness those kinds of places we almost think of as left behind communities, children just don’t do so well. And not only that, if they do manage to get into higher education, they often don’t return to those communities. So those communities, once you look at people in work that just have many, many fewer people with higher education qualifications and skills to other areas. Let’s call them the thriving areas, many of which are in the southeast or in the more successful cities. And these differences are really important because they’re having huge impacts in the way people think about their well being levelling up political discourse.

Christine Garrington  20:07 

You talked earlier a bit about their fabulous data in Norway that you had available to you. But we’ve also got some great data here in the UK, haven’t we, particularly when it comes to tracking young people through education?

Richard Blundell  20:20 

We have the National Pupil database that follows all children through school, through higher education, or through their education and training and into work right up to about the age of 28/29 now. So we’re, and that will go on. So this is a remarkable, a remarkable dataset of the kind that you would typically think of finding only in a Scandinavian country. So this has allowed us to do these differences. And we can look at two children doing exactly the same courses in the same university, and just look at the differences of outcome by parental background and they’re still there, they’re still quite important. So parental background really matters. But so does course choices and university choices. These things, I guess we knew that have a big impact. All these things that people are doing through their their education, and early working lives and at university have a long lasting impact. And many of the differences you can take back to geography, and parental background, and the early education investments. This is really providing a real detail in what’s driving the inequalities that we see at least in working, working careers.

Christine Garrington  21:47 

Yeah, on that note, I’d like to put a final question to you really about, you know, for those interested who in tackling inequality, obviously, including yourself and your fellow researchers, the wonderful team that you’ve talked about there. But for those who have responsibility for creating interventions through policy or practice, are there any essential takeaways, implications or recommendations for your project that you’d like to share?

Richard Blundell  22:11 

If there’s something we’re going to really have to address the in the UK and elsewhere it’s these geographic divides. It’s what is creating a lot of the political turmoil, I think, whether it be almost in any elections, we’ve seen the left behind areas. You know, the evidence is clear, these geographical divides, by socioeconomic background, and by areas are really important and long lasting. And it’s really up to us to figure out the best ways now, to address them as quickly as possible. They’ve been exacerbated through COVID and so they become even more urgent, I think, in the policy debate.

Christine Garrington  22:56 

And I guess my final final question, is there something specific that we should be focusing on?

Richard Blundell  23:03 

There’s a lot, but let me just pick on one, it’s a kind of old topic, it’s the it’s the point about good jobs. You can have successful interventions for people who come from, you know, backgrounds or haven’t been quite successful at education investments, you can make better choices during education. And we’ve seen how, with the data and work we’ve been doing, how that can be improved. But it’s really the match of the skills, the firms and the kind of work related nature of these training investments that’s so important. And what we have learned here is that, you know, small interventions on one aspect of this are not going to solve the problems. So you can think of the example of the, of just providing a job. What we’ve seen here is that just providing a job, say, Amazon warehouse job is not really going to help much with career profiles, you really need to match workers, develop their skills, and bring the right kind of firms that can enhance career profiles into these more left behind deprived areas. If we can get that to work, then there’s great hope that we can do something for the careers and wage profiles of people who’ve been doing rather less well than we’d like in society.

Christine Garrington  24:39 

Thanks to Richard Blundell for joining us for this episode of the DIAL podcast. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org and also on the IFS website at ifs.org.uk. Much of the work of Richard and his colleagues has also fed into the Deaton Review on inequality so do take a look there as well. We hope you enjoyed this episode, which is produced and presented by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts.

The long-term effects of school closures

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by Alexander Ludwig and colleagues

This blog was first published by VOXeu.

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis in the spring of 2020, politicians around the world closed schools and child-care centers together with businesses in an effort to contain the virus. According to the World Bank, around 1.6 billion school children were affected by these closures at their peak. While the economic costs of closing businesses arise immediately and are thus very salient, closed schools and child-care centers have negative economic effects on the human capital accumulation of children that only arise in the long run. Education is a crucial determinant of future wages, and schools are an important driver of intergenerational mobility. In the short-run, parents, and especially mothers, are struggling with combining work and child care while schools are closed, but what are the long-run economic impacts of Covid-related school closures on the affected children? 

A model of schooling and parental investment into children

To answer this question, we build a model that features public schooling as input into the human capital production of children, as well as monetary and time investment of parents into their children. At the core of the model, there is a human capital production function that features self-productivity, i.e. human capital builds on itself, and complementarity, i.e. the higher the human capital, the more productive is investment into human capital (Cunha and Heckman, 2007; Cunha, Heckman and Schennach, 2010). 

From age 4 to age 16 children reside with their parents who invest time and resources into their education, which, combined with public expenditures, governs the evolution of human capital of the children from kindergarten through high school. At the age of 16, high-school students decide whether to stop schooling and start working, to complete high school, or to obtain a college degree. At that time parents endow their children with intra-vivo transfers that can be used to finance higher education. The terminal school degree (college, high-school, high-school dropout) as well as the human capital accumulated during their schooling period determines wages of the children once they enter the labor market. 

We calibrate the model to data from the US. Parents are heterogeneous with respect to marital status, education, income, and assets. Parental characteristics affect not only the innate ability of their children, but also the optimal investment into their children. We model the school and child-care closures as a drop in governmental investment into children corresponding to school closures of six months. In addition, the COVID-19 shock comprises a fall in parental income through increased unemployment, with a larger incidence for less educated parents. We then use the model as a laboratory to ask how parents react to these shocks, and what are the ultimate labor market and welfare effects on the children? 

Our main results are summarized in Table 1. We find that the children affected by the school closures suffer long-run average wage losses of -1%. These wage losses lead to a reduction in welfare corresponding to a consumption equivalent variation of -0.7%. An important driver of the long-term wage losses are changes in the final educational attainment of the children; the table summarizes the percentage point changes in the education shares. Translated into percent changes, the share of college educated children falls by -2.6%, and the share of high school drop-outs increases by 4.1%, due to the fact that the children impacted by COVID-19 school closures early in their life arrive at age 16 with significantly less human capital than in the absence of COVID-induced school closures.

Thus, there are significant permanent negative effects associated with a purely temporary shock. For the children, the negative effects of the temporary school closures are much more important than the negative effects caused by the temporary income drop of their parents: school closures account for 90% of their overall welfare loss.

Table 1: Aggregate Outcomes of School Closures and Income Recession

Baseline change for children of biological age
average 4 6 14
change in %p
share s=no 12.15% 0.50 0.56 0.67 0.31
share s=hs 54.53% 0.38 0.27 0.32 0.43
share s=co 33.32% -0.88 -0.83 -0.99 -0.74
change in %
PDV gross earn $784,196 -0.99 -0.96 -1.19 -0.77
CEV children – -0.70 -0.72 -0.84 -0.54

These negative effects emerge despite the optimal efforts of parents to offset the impact of school closures by increased parental time and resource inputs into their children’s education. On average, parents increase their time investment into children by 3.8%, and their monetary investment by 5.1%. However, due to their own income loss, parental intra-vivo transfers fall by -0.3%. These changes imply welfare losses of -0.3% for the parents themselves.

The average long-term gross earnings loss of -1% for the children translates into a net earnings loss of -0.8%, assuming no changes in the tax and transfer system. Given the progressivity of labor income taxes, the lower average earnings lead to disproportionally lower tax payments. Thus, while the tax system to some degree shelters children from the future negative income effects, the flip side is that future government revenues fall by more than the gross earnings loss endured by these future workers, namely by -1.8%. Thus, COVID-19 school closures in the short-run foreshadow a substantial fiscal crisis in the long run.

Younger children and children from disadvantaged households suffer more

The earnings and welfare effects of the school closures depend significantly on the age at which they happen. For children aged 6 who are about to start primary school when the COVID-19 school closures occur, long-term earnings losses amount to -1.2%, with associated welfare losses of -0.8%. By contrast, for children aged 14, these losses are approximately one third lower, amounting to -0.8% and -0.5%, respectively. The reason for this age pattern is that human capital builds on itself, and lower human capital leads to lower optimal investments in the future.

Thus, for children aged 6, parents optimally increase their investments at the time of the closures but cannot completely offset the human capital loss on impact. This leads to lower parental investments in future periods, relative to a world without the school closures. Compared to children of age 6,  younger pre-school children are somewhat sheltered from the negative effects of the closures, because at that age parental investments play a more important role for human capital accumulation than governmental investments. 

In addition to the age of the child, parental characteristics are a crucial determinant of the magnitude of the earnings and welfare losses for children from the COVID-19 crisis. The welfare losses of the school closures for children are decreasing in parental education as well as in parental assets. Well-to-do parents have more resources to help out their children during the school closures, and also have a higher incentive to do so.

Their children have on average higher human capital than the children of less well-off parents, and thus, given the complementarity of investments and human capital, larger investment increases after the school closures subside are optimal for them. Therefore, the role of parental characteristics for the school success of children is amplified by the COVID-19 school closures.

Prolonged school closures make the effects worse

The current second Covid-19 wave in the fall of 2020 makes prolonged school closures a reality in some school districts, and renewed school closures a possibility in many more. We find that the welfare effects of one-year school closures are more than twice as large as the welfare effects of six months school closures. The loss in schooling and associated human capital accumulation is harder to offset the longer the crisis lasts. 

Hybrid and digital teaching

Many schools relied on various forms of digital teaching during the school closures, and nowadays implement hybrid teaching formats, combining in-person instruction and remote teaching. The literature thus far provides only scant evidence on the effectiveness of online vs. in-person instruction, and thus it is hard to gauge the long-run consequences of digital teaching.

Yet, there is evidence that children from disadvantaged households have less access to and/or make less use of digital forms of teaching during the current crisis. Opportunity insights reports that student participation in online math work decreased immediately for all children at the start of the school closures, but ultimately decreased by 41% for children from low income ZIP codes by the end of the school year compared to January 2020, by 32% for children from middle income ZIP codes, and not at all for children from high income ZIP codes.

It is plausible that both the equipment for digital teaching among teachers, as well as the equipment and the provision of quiet learning spaces for the students depend on socio-economic characteristics. While we cannot put hard numbers on the differential use of online learning by parental characteristics, our model allows us to trace out the heterogeneous wage and welfare effects, by parental background, when the length of school closures is negatively correlated with socio-economic characteristics of the parents.

For example, if one assumes that the school closures in combination with distance learning opportunities correspond to a complete school closure of 3 months for children of college educated parents, but of 6 months for children of high school dropouts, then the welfare impact is -0.7% for the latter group, but only -0.3% for the former group.

Conclusion

School and child-care closures have significant negative long-term consequences on the human capital and welfare of the affected children, especially those from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. This reduction in human capital accumulation is likely slowing the long-run growth prospects of countries, especially those whose economies are relatively human capital intensive, such as the U.S. and Europe.

Thus, school and child-care closures are potentially very costly measures to avoid the spread of the Covid-19 virus. This point was initially largely lost in the political debate, likely because these negative effects arise only in the long-run and thus are not immediately measurable. Medical research now also indicates that children are not the primary drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic, in contrast to pandemics caused by the influenza virus.

During the current second wave of the crisis in the fall of 2020, governments seem more committed to keep schools and child-care centers open as long as possible. For example, Germany and France are closing restaurants, bars, and the entertainment industry during their “lockdown light” in November 2020, but not schools and child-care centers. Our research suggests that this policy choice has the potential to pay significant long-run dividends for future generations, even though it might contribute to a more rapidly evolving second wave of Covid-19 infections in the short-run.

The Long Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures, by Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Dirk Krueger, Alexander Ludwig and Irina Popova, was published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in August 2020: CEPR Discussion Paper 15227.

How has Covid-19 affected the lives of older nurses?

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by Maggie O’Neill, National University of Ireland, Galway

The effects of COVID19 have challenged societies and healthcare systems across the world.

And that impact has been especially pronounced for the working lives of nurses, who work in front-line roles, a new study reveals.

“I feel that we’re still basically seen as the handmaidens of the health service. And I wouldn’t have felt that before the pandemic, but I do now.”

These were the words of Martina – not her real name – who was one of 25 older nurses we interviewed for a recent research study on how the pandemic has affected older nurses in Ireland.

By giving voice to older nurses in Ireland in this way, we hope to provide understanding of their experiences at this time of crises, to identify the resources that are needed to support them to keep working or in their pathways to retirement, in the context of a health system in Ireland that was already under-resourced before the pandemic.

Our qualitative study focuses on the experiences and views of older nurses in Ireland of working through the pandemic to explore, firstly, what are the main impacts of the pandemic on the working lives of older nurses in Ireland, including theirs and their families’ health and wellbeing? And, secondly, how does the pandemic affect their retirement timing decisions? Twenty-five nurses aged 49 and over participated in telephone or online interviews, sixteen women and nine men. Pseudonyms are used in this article.

Poor health impacts

Our key finding was that many older women nurses in Ireland are now seeking to retire early. The findings stem from interviews carried out in early 2021, representing a follow up to in-depth interviews about their working lives with the same nurses prior to the pandemic. While some nurses respond positively to the pandemic, expressing a renewed sense of invigoration, most report poor health impacts, with several experiencing stress and exhaustion, and some contracting the virus and passing it on to their families – a predominant fear for all nurses and especially those with caring responsibilities.

James, whose mother is in her nineties and living at home, underlines these concerns:

“You’re nearly scared to go to work and then you’re nearly scared to come home in case you’re taking something back home”.

Many of the women nurses describe feeling pulled between staying on or retiring early, with over half now planning to retire early. Martina explained:

“I just don’t feel I can do this until I’m 65, Nor do I want to … whether I’ll just in another couple of years say, to hell with it, I’m hanging up my boots and I’m leaving, I don’t know. I wouldn’t like to think I will. Because … this is my 40th year working in health. And I would hate to think that I’d bow out like that.”

Gender divide

As most of the men nurses say that the pandemic does not affect their decision to retire, a clear gender divide emerges.

In terms of public recognition for the role, Martina draws attention to the futility of the practice introduced during the pandemic of clapping for healthcare workers when…

“We’ve lost staff … we’ve looked after people in spite of it …”.

A similar view is echoed by several of the nurses interviewed.

On a personal level, many nurses say that their perception of the role hadn’t changed – they would expect to do the same work regardless of the conditions. Some express an increased sense of pride in themselves and in their profession, distilled by their experience of working through the pandemic. As Bridget says:

“We can offer so much to patients … seeing nurses holding that patient’s hand, when … the family member couldn’t come in, they’re at end of life … and sitting there reassuring them … to me, that was the essence of nursing”.

New and timely insights

Our research provides new and timely insights into the impact of COVID-19 for older nurses in Ireland. Age, health and caring responsibilities represent important considerations for men and women, but more so women, if they are leaning to retiring earlier.

These findings about nurses’ responses to working through the pandemic demonstrate the need for nuanced employer and government policies that provide supports including not only improved infrastructure and increased staffing levels but also flexible work options, consideration for staff who care for vulnerable family members, and pre-retirement schemes.

In a health system that was already under resourced and under pressure prior to the pandemic, actions rather than words are now needed to recognise the indispensable work of older nurses.

  • The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Working Lives and Retirement Timing of Older Nurses in Ireland, is research by Áine Ní Léime and Margaret O’Neill and is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Sharing housework in the pandemic: what changed and for how long?

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In Episode 5 of Series 2 of our podcast, we talk to Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez from the University of Berlin and Susan Harkness from the University of Bristol about research from the DIAL funded Equal Lives project on the gendered division of housework during lockdown and whether or not changes that happened were temporary or long-lasting.

Gender division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic: Temporary shocks or durable change? 

is research published in Demographic Research by Alejandra Rodríguez-Sánchez, Anette Fasang and Susan Harkness.

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we’re discussing findings from DIAL’s Equal Lives Project, which looks at how inequality impacts the lives of young adults. Our guests in today’s episode, are Equal Lives’ Principal Investigator Susan Harkness, and Aleja Rodríguez Sánchez. They’ve been looking at the gender division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic, to see whether any changes are temporary or longer lasting. I started by asking Susan to explain the backdrop to the research.

Susan Harkness  0:32 

So this research fits into a larger body of research looking at how inequalities evolve over the lifecourse. And so when COVID came along, we realised it revealed that there are really important changes going on and new inequalities and growing inequalities we needed to think about so a part of that we’re looking at what is happening within families, and in particular, how households divide their labour because that has implications for what happens in the labour market and what happens to broader inequalities.

Christine Garrington  1:01 

Aleja what exactly was it that you’re hoping to get a better handle on, a better understanding of in all of this?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  1:09

Yeah, we started with the idea that maybe the effects of the pandemic and the lockdown on the division of labour were going to affect some people more than others. We intended to look at what couples would do differently if they had children or didn’t have children. We also further wanted to look at whether the age of the child would make a difference in how the pandemic impacted the division of labour. But then we realised that there were a lot of things going on at the same time and it wasn’t going to be easy to sort of look at one moment in time and before and after. And so we wanted to give it a more dynamic look and see how the situation evolved over time as these further changes in the furlough scheme, childcare and school closures were put in place and then lifted. 

Christine Garrington  1:55 

Can you talk us through exactly what it was that you that you did?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  1:58 

We opted for a very, first, very descriptive type of study, looking at the share of housework done by women, and here we look at the percentage or the proportion or the share that it’s done by women of the total amount of number of hours spent on housework, cooking, cleaning, but does not include childcare in this case. So we want to know how that share of the work done by women changed. So we wanted to look at this quantity at different moments in the pandemic. We wanted to look at it first shock but then we also wanted to look at what happened after that first shock, whether those same things, the same effects would have stayed over time or were they, whether there would need some sort of change. And for that we use a technique called kernel density estimation, which helps us to see how the distribution of a variable in the population has shifted over time. So we wanted to first estimate pre-pandemic distribution and then we wanted to see how the distribution has shifted over time. Then secondly, we wanted to sort of further those descriptive analysis with a fixed effects type of regression, which basically we tried to compare couples to their own selves in the past to sort of get rid of some of the heterogeneity that it’s unobserved. 

Christine Garrington  3:13 

You got your information from an especially conducted COVID survey, what sorts of things were people asked in that that made it possible to look really closely at these questions?

 Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  3:23  

Yeah, the COVID survey – it’s really like a special very special or very unique study, in a way even for other in comparison to other UK studies that were done during the first year of COVID. The sample is basically a sub sample of this Understanding Society study, which is this much larger study that has followed UK households for more than 10 years. And there were lots of questions on how the COVID pandemic affected sort of the general welfare of households and individuals and there were questions about socio-economic conditions, I think, unemployment stuff, and there were also things about family dynamics. So it’s quite comprehensive. And I think there’s a lot more to see in there.

Christine Garrington  4:02 

How and why do surveys like this help us gain such important insights into what is going on in people’s lives and how that’s changing over time?

Susan Harkness  4:11 

Okay, so there’s two things that are really valuable about surveys like the UK household Longitudinal Survey, or Understanding Society, as we call it. First of all, it’s a survey that’s conducted at the household level so we can see what’s going on. Not just amongst individuals, but how, how relationships within the household pan out. And then the second thing that’s valuable about it of course, is the longitudinal aspect. So that really allows us to look at changes over time. And that allows us to understand much more about why we have inequalities and how they affect different people. So in the case of the COVID studies, we can see where change happened, where they relatively, families where things were relatively equal before became more unequal? Or which particular groups were most affected? So we can see these changes over time. And I suppose if we look at the COVID Understanding Society surveys, and what’s also really valuable about this survey is that whilst there have been a lot of other surveys which have given us a sort of snapshot of what’s happening at a particular point in time, with the COVID surveys with Understanding Society, we can see how these inequalities are emerging as we move through the pandemic so we can see who is being affected and how that is changing for them over time.

Christine Garrington  5:30 

Yeah, really important and Aleja so let’s get down into the nitty gritty then – when you, when you looked over time at how men and women were dividing housework or sharing housework at different times during the pandemic. What did you find?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  5:44 

Yeah, well, we found a remarkable first data set that is seen as a sort of shift in the distribution towards more equality between couples. So the original pre-pandemic distribution it’s quite was quite unequal and therefore sort of skewed looking like more women, we’re doing more. So visually, it really looks like a bump around like 65-70%, which means really, women do the majority of this housework. And so the first shock is that the shape of that bump to the left, so to say towards more equality, so it’s close to 50/50 but it’s not quite there yet. And then after, after that first shock with the data for further and further waves revealed was a gradual, but a clear return to previous levels, that we’re seeing pre-pandemic where women started to do again a higher percentage of the total housework over time. And this sort of return to normal was especially clear for couples with children, whereas couples without children, we saw that this higher equality achieve after their lockdown or during the lockdown was more sustained. And these results were also confirmed with the fixed effects regression that I mentioned. So we think that the results basically show us that there were different trends, depending on the lifecourse stage in which the family was.

Christine Garrington  7:07 

Yeah, so it looks to be fairly robust doesn’t it? And Susan, is that what you expected to see? Or were you surprised that having children made a difference to whether couples continue to share housework more equally, or revert to their pre-pandemic habits as it were in this, this area?

Susan Harkness  7:23 

Right, well of course, I mean, COVID has been an enormous shock, I think. Especially in the early months where we had people’s work was affected, and for those who had children schools were closed. And I think that shock meant that couples changed their behaviour, whether they had children or not. And of course, there was a lot of early optimism that, that those changes would mean a bit more gender equality. But what we’ve seen is I think that as people have adapted, we’ve seen the sort of patterns emerge in a way that’s quite similar to what happens for example, when children, children are born. And we have this specialisation, where women tend to revert back to taking on more of the roles involved in sort of looking after the house whereas men tend to specialise more in work. So sadly, and I think for those with children, I think we see these greater specialisation – so children are often a trigger for more specialisation within households with, with men doing more paid work and women doing more of the housework. And I think to some extent, what we’re finding reflects these, these old patterns that we’ve seen previously in the data before COVID. So perhaps early optimism was, was not as well placed as it might have been.

Christine Garrington  8:31 

Hmmm I will ask you a bit more about the implications of that in a moment, but Aleja what would you say that we’ve learned from this piece of research that you’ve done and I wonder if you have plans to look further at this particular area, this particular aspect of people’s lives?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  8:45 

I think one key message besides what Susan has already said is that before and after comparisons, sort of they can be informative, but they’re only showing us like a snapshot of what actually happened. And longitudinal data is really key because for us, we gained a lot of information by actually looking at how things evolved over time, which gives a different take on this, on how, when we claimed, those early claims on how the pandemic would change at all for the better or worse we are definitely looking at working already further on the COVID-19 effects. But this time, we’re going to, we’re shifting the perspective from the couple to the children in particular to teenagers. We’re interested in understanding what factors may explain some preliminary findings on what was found as the serious deterioration of mental health among teenagers, especially teenage girls. We want to see what factors about their families but particularly about mothers who were also having, were having a hard time during the pandemic may explain what happened to teenagers. And so we’re working with Susan and Annette on this.

Christine Garrington  9:52 

Yeah, no really interesting, more really important work to come by the sounds of things. So Susan, just to wrap up really a lot has been said about how COVID-19 has negatively affected the lives of women more than men. Fears have been expressed around the reversal of any sort of pre-pandemic trends towards a greater gender equality. Would you say that this piece of research and, and other work that you’re doing tells us anything about that, do you think?

Susan Harkness  10:17 

Well, I think certainly other studies have, have shown that women’s mental health has been particularly adversely affected by the pandemic and particularly by the lockdown measures, so we know that some of the responses to the COVID crisis have really negatively affected women more than they have affected men. We’ve also, I think seeing some trends in the labour market where particularly mother’s employment is perhaps recovering a bit more slowly than that, that of men to pre-pandemic levels of employment and hours of work. So I think there are some indications that there are implications for gender equality, and that those are not necessarily going to be reversed in the short term. I think the longer-term consequences are much harder to tell of course. You know, what effect this, these, these closures has on women and their careers is, it’s something that we don’t yet know, but it’s, it’s not hard to imagine reasons that parents may feel that they’re going to fall, fall behind in the labour market because of the extra roles they’ve had to take on over this crisis. And I suppose the question remains about whether in the longer term, they’ll be able to catch up with where they may have been otherwise.

Christine Garrington  11:31 

“Gender Division of Housework Furing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Temporary Shocks or Durable Change” is research by Alejandro Rodriguez Sanchez, Annette Fasang and Susan Harkness and is published in Demographic Research. You can find out more about the Equal Lives project at www.equal-lives.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington. Don’t forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast to access earlier and forthcoming episodes.