Research Group Pandemic Press


Research Papers

List of COME-HERE Papers

We use quarterly panel data from the COME-HERE survey covering five European countries to analyze three facets of the experience of loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, in terms of prevalence, loneliness peaked in April 2020, followed by a U-shape pattern in the rest of 2020, and then remained relatively stable throughout 2021 and 2022. We then establish the individual determinants of loneliness and compare them to those found in the literature predating the COVID-19 pandemic. As in previous work, women are lonelier, and partnership, education, income, and employment protect against loneliness. However, the pandemic substantially shifted the age profile: it is now the youngest who are the loneliest. We last show that pandemic policies affected loneliness, which rose with containment policies but fell with government economic support. Conversely, the intensity of the pandemic itself, via the number of recent COVID-19 deaths, had only a minor impact. The experience of the pandemic has thus shown that public policy can influence societal loneliness trends.

The economic shutdown and national lockdown following the outbreak of COVID-19 forced families to take on tasks themselves that were previously outsourced, like child care and housecleaning. These tasks were, and to a degree still are, traditionally performed by women. The concern is that the pandemic placed these burdens again primarily on their shoulders. In this study, we examine how the lockdown-imposed difficulties to the outsourcing of essential household tasks affected views on who in the family should sacrifice their career to cope with new challenges, and how these views interacted with ideological commitments. Analyzing data collected from an experiment embedded in a representative survey of nearly 4,000 residents from five West European countries, we find that the pandemic reduced the ideological polarization between the political left and right with regards to gender roles and household tasks. However, this reduced polarization is primarily found among female respondents.

This paper investigates the association between several mental health indicators (depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness) and the overall tendency to follow official recommendations regarding self-protection against COVID-19 (i.e., overall compliance). We employ panel data from the COME-HERE survey, collected over four waves, on 7,766 individuals (22,878 observations) from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. Employing a flexible specification that allows the association to be non-monotonic, we find a U-shaped relationship, in which transitions to low and high levels of mental health are associated with higher overall compliance, while transitions to medium levels of mental health are associated with less overall compliance. Moreover, anxiety, stress, and loneliness levels at baseline (i.e., at wave 1) also have a U-shaped effect on overall compliance later (i.e., recommendations are followed best by those with lowest and highest levels of anxiety, stress, and loneliness at baseline, while following the recommendations is lowest for those with moderate levels of these variables). These U shapes, which are robust to several specifications, may explain some of the ambiguous results reported in the previous literature. Additionally, we observe a U-shaped association between the mental health indicators and a number of specific health behaviours (including washing hands and mask wearing). Importantly, most of these specific behaviours play a role in overall compliance. Finally, we uncover the role of gender composition effects in some of the results. While variations in depression and stress are negatively associated with variations in overall compliance for men, the association is positive for women. The U-shaped relation in the full sample (composed of males and females) will reflect first the negative slope for males and then the positive slope for females.

Using a unique harmonized real‐time data set from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey that covers five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden) and applying a non-parametric machine learning model, this paper identifies the main individual and macro-level predictors of self-protecting behaviors against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during the first wave of the pandemic. Exploiting the interpretability of a Random Forest algorithm via Shapely values, we find that a higher regional incidence of COVID-19 triggers higher levels of self-protective behavior, as does a stricter government policy response. The level of individual knowledge about the pandemic, confidence in institutions, and population density also ranks high among the factors that predict self-protecting behaviors. We also identify a steep socioeconomic gradient with lower levels of self-protecting behaviors being associated with lower income and poor housing conditions. Among socio-demographic factors, gender, marital status, age, and region of residence are the main determinants of self-protective measures.

We here investigate the role of risk aversion in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. The theoretical effect is ambiguous, as both COVID-19 infection and vaccination side-effects involve probabilistic elements. In large-scale data covering five European countries, we find that vaccine hesitancy falls with risk aversion, so that COVID-19 infection is perceived as involving greater risk than vaccination.

The authors track the well-being of individuals across five European countries during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and relate their well-being to working from home. The authors also consider the role of pandemic-policy stringency in affecting well-being in Europe.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors have four waves of novel harmonized longitudinal data in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden, covering the period May–November 2020. Well-being is measured in five dimensions: life satisfaction, a worthwhile life, loneliness, depression and anxiety. A retrospective diary indicates whether the individual was working in each month since February 2020 and if so whether at home or not at home. Policy stringency is matched in per country at the daily level. The authors consider both cross- section and panel regressions and the mediating and moderating effects of control variables, including household variables and income.

Findings – Well-being among workers is lower for those who work from home, and those who are not working have the lowest well-being of all. The panel results are more mitigated, with switching into working at home yielding a small drop in anxiety. The panel and cross-section difference could reflect adaptation or the selection of certain types of individuals into working at home. Policy stringency is always negatively correlated with well-being. The authors find no mediation effects. The well-being penalty from working at home is larger for the older, the better educated, those with young children and those with more crowded housing.

Originality/value – The harmonized cross-country panel data on individuals’ experiences during COVID-19 are novel. The authors relate working from home and policy stringency to multiple well-being measures. The authors emphasize the effect of working from home on not only the level of well-being but also its distribution.

Rationale: The coronavirus pandemic has forced governments to implement a variety of different dynamic lockdown-stringency strategies in the last two years. Extensive lockdown periods could have potential unintended consequences on mental health, at least for at-risk groups.

Objective: We present novel evidence on the heterogeneous direct and indirect effects of lockdown-stringency measures on individuals’ perception of social isolation (i.e. loneliness) using panel data from five European countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Sweden), which tracks changes in both in-person and remote social interactions between May 2020 and March 2021.

Method: We combine data from the COME-HERE panel survey (University of Luxembourg) and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT). We implement a dynamic mixture model in order to estimate the loneliness sub-population classes based on the severity of loneliness, as well as the evolution of social interactions.

Results: While loneliness is remarkably persistent over time, we find substantial heterogeneity across individuals, identifying four latent groups by loneliness severity. Group membership probability varies with age, gender, education and cohabitation status. Moreover, we note significant differences in the impact of social interactions on loneliness by degree of severity. Older people are less likely to feel lonely, but were more affected by lockdown measures, partly due to a reduction in face-to-face interactions. On the contrary, the younger, especially those living alone, report high levels of loneliness that are largely unaffected by changes in the pandemic after lockdown measures were initially implemented.

Conclusions: Understanding the heterogeneity in loneliness is key for the identification of at-risk populations that can be severely affected by extended lockdown measures. As part of public-health crisis-response systems, it is critical to develop support measures for older individuals living alone, as well as promoting continuous remote communication for individuals more likely to experience high levels of loneliness.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to lifestyle changes across Europe with a likely impact on sleep quality. This investigation considers sleep quality in relation to the evolution of theCOVID-19 pandemic in five European countries. Using panel regressions and keeping policy responses to COVID-19 constant, we show that an increase in the four-week average dailyCOVID-19 deaths/100,000 inhabitants (our proxy for the evolution of the pandemic)significantly reduced sleep quality in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden between April 2020 and June 2021. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests and are larger for women, parents and young adults. Additionally, we show that about half of the reduction in sleep quality caused by the evolution of the pandemic can be attributed to changes in lifestyles, worsened mental health and negative attitudes toward COVID-19 and its management (lower degree of confidence in government, greater fear of being infected). In contrast, changes in one’s own infection-status from the SARS-CoV-2 virus or sleep duration are not significant mediators of the relationship between COVID-19-related deaths and sleep quality.

We validate whether social media data can be used to complement social surveys to the public’s COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Taking advantage of recent artificial intelligence advances, we propose a framework to estimate individuals’ vaccine hesitancy from their social media posts. With 745,661 vaccine-related tweets originating from three Western European countries, we compare vaccine hesitancy levels measured with our framework against that collected from multiple consecutive waves of surveys. We successfully validate that Twitter, one popular social media platform, can be used as a data source to calculate consistent public acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines with surveys at both country and region levels. In addition, this consistency persists over time although it varies among socio-demographic sub-populations. Our findings establish the power of social media in complementing social surveys to capture the continuously changing vaccine hesitancy in a global health crisis similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Understanding what lies behind actual COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is fundamental to help policy makers increase vaccination rates and reach herd immunity. We use June 2021 data the COME-HERE survey to explore the predictors of actual vaccine hesitancy in France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and Sweden. We estimate a linear-probability model with a rich set of covariates and address issues of common-method variance. 13% of our sample say they do not plan to be vaccinated. Post-Secondary education, home-ownership, having an underlying health condition, and one standard-deviation higher age or income are all associated with lower vaccine hesitancy of 2–4.5% points. Conservative-leaning political attitudes and a one standard-deviation lower degree of confidence in the government increase this probability by 3 and 6% points respectively. Vaccine hesitancy in Spain and Sweden is significantly lower than in the other countries.

  • Clark, A.E., D’Ambrosio, C., Lepinteur, A., and Menta, G. (2022). “Pandemic Policy and Individual Income Changes across Europe.” ECINEQ Working Paper Series No. 600

We use data from the COME-HERE panel survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of COVID-19 policy responses on disposable incomes in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden between January 2020 and October 2021. Policy responses are measured by the Stringency and Economic Support Indices from the Oxford COVID-19 Government-Response Tracker. Controlling for the evolution of the pandemic itself, we find that the income cost of greater stringency measures is borne only by the most economically-vulnerable, while government economic-support measures have a positive effect across the income distribution.

We use data from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden over the course of 2020. Policy responses are measured by the Stringency Index and the Economic Support Index from the Blavatnik School of Government. Stringency is systematically associated with lower life satisfaction, controlling for the intensity of the pandemic itself. This stringency effect is larger for women, those with weak ties to the labour market, and in richer households. The effect of the Economic Support is never statistically different from zero.

We here use panel data from the COME-HERE survey to track income inequality during COVID-19 in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Relative inequality in equivalent household disposable income among individuals changed in a hump-shaped way between January 2020 and January 2021, with an initial rise from January to May 2020 being more than reversed by September 2020. Absolute inequality also fell over this period. Due to the pandemic some households lost more than others, and government compensation schemes were targeted towards the poorest, implying that on average income differences decreased. Generalized Lorenz domination reveals that these distributive changes reduced welfare in Italy.

Using real-time data from the University of Luxembourg’s COME-HERE nationally representative panel survey, covering more than 8,000 individuals across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, the author investigates how income distributions and poverty rates have changed from January to September 2020. The author finds that poverty rates increased on average in all countries from January to May and partially recovered in September. The increase in poverty is heterogeneous across countries, with Italy being the most affected and France the least; within countries, COVID-19 contributed to exacerbating poverty differences across regions in Italy and Spain. With a set of poverty measures from the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke family, the author then explores the role of individual characteristics in shaping different poverty profiles across countries. Results suggest that poverty increased disproportionately more for young individuals, women, and respondents who had a job in January 2020 – with different intensities across countries.

List of COME-Here working papers

  • Costi, C., Clark, A. E., Lepinteur, A., Menta, G., & D’Ambrosio, C. (2024). Return-to-Office Mandates, Health and Well-being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. Mimeo.

An exogenous shift in working conditions for public-sector workers in Italy allows us to investigate the causal effect of a return-to-office (RTO) mandate on worker health and well-being. In nine waves of quarterly panel data there is a significant fall in teleworking amongst those affected by the RTO mandate. These workers also report spending more days outdoors, working fewer hours, interacting less with relatives and friends after the mandate. Despite these changes, we consistently find no significant effect of the RTO mandate on a battery of health and well-being measures. This likely reflects the positive and negative aspects of going back to the office cancelling each other out. 

Prior to around 2011, there was a pronounced curvilinear relationship between age and wellbeing: poor mental health was hump-shaped with respect to age, whilst subjective well-being was U-shaped. We examine data from a European panel for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden called, Come-Here, for 2020-2023, plus data from International Social Survey Program (ISSP) surveys for 2011 and 2021 and some country-specific data. Mental ill-health now declines in a roughly monotonic fashion with age, whilst subjective well-being rises with age. We also show that young people with poorer mental health spend more time daily in front of a screen on the internet or their smartphone, and that within-person increases in poor mental health are correlated with spending more time in front of a screen. This evidence appears important because it is among the first pieces of research to use panel data on individuals to track the relationship between screen time and changes in mental health, and because the results caution against simply using the presence of the internet in the household, or low usage indicators (such as having used the internet in the last week) to capture the role played by screen time in the growth of mental ill-health.

  • Riera-Mallol, G., Clark, A. E., Lepinteur, A., Vögele, C., & D’Ambrosio, C. (2024). Has Covid Made Us Less Resilient?. Mimeo.

We here establish how individual resilience changed following economic and health shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic using COME-HERE panel data covering five European countries. We consider both the incidence and intensity of these shocks. We test two existing models: post-traumatic growth and Graham and Oswald’s model predicting reduced resilience after adversity. Our findings support the latter, with the experience of at least one negative shock (job loss, a drop in household income, isolation, or the diagnosis of a mental disorder) during the pandemic reducing future resilience.

  • Kornadt, A., Wettsein, M., Lepinteur, A., Vögele, C., & D’Ambrosio, C. (2024). Associations of Subjective Age Trajectories with Loneliness and Stress Across Adulthood. Mimeo.

Subjective age, that is the age a person feels like in relation to their chronological age, is indicative of a variety of biological, psychological, and social aging processes. Despite its importance, studies that investigate multi-variate, dynamic, longitudinal relations of subjective age with its potential determinants and potential mechanisms of these relations have so far rarely been employed. In the current study, we focus on loneliness as a potential subjective age determinant. As loneliness affects a variety of psychosocial and health outcomes across life and is stereotypically perceived as a feature of old age, we investigate whether loneliness is related with levels and changes in subjective age. We furthermore test whether this association is mediated via self-reported stress. N = 5,594 participants aged 18 – 93 years (Mage = 50.41, SD = 15.99) who participated in a longitudinal survey comprising up to three measurement occasions over a time span of 2.5 years reported their loneliness, subjective age, and stress as well as sociodemographic and health-related covariates. We employed latent growth modeling and found that, when controlling for sociodemographic and health-related covariates, higher loneliness was related to an older subjective age cross-sectionally and a to steeper increase in subjective age over time. These relations were mediated via stress; however, the relation between stress and subjective age was no longer statistically significant when including the covariates. All associations were qualified by significant interactions with chronological age, albeit in different directions. Our findings attest to the associations between loneliness, stress and subjective aging experiences and highlight the need for an age-informed approach when planning further studies and interventions.

  • Kornadt, A., Bowen, C., Lepinteur, A., D’Ambrosio, C., Ratti, L., & Vögele, C. (2024). Working from home and well-being during the pandemic and beyond. A longitudinal analysis in five countries. Mimeo.

Given the rise of remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many studies have investigated how working from home is related to employee well-being, with mixed findings. The current study adds to this extant literature by describing the longitudinal relationship between WFH and well-being over 11 assessments from April 2020 to November 2023, based on a unique, representative sample of N = 3403 employed participants from five European countries. Employing multilevel regression models, we found that even when controlling for relevant covariates, WFH was negatively related to well-being in the initial stages of the pandemic, but unrelated to WFH thereafter. Our analysis offers a differentiated picture on within- and between-person dynamics of WFH and well-being over the course of the pandemic and beyond and can inform the discussion how individuals, organizations, and societies can prepare for a future in which WFH plays a more prominent role.

We evaluate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the life satisfaction of healthcare workers, as compared to the wider workforce, in five European countries. In ten waves of quarterly panel data, the life satisfaction of healthcare workers is always higher than that of other essential workers and non-essential workers. Life satisfaction follows a double humped pattern over time for all workers, which is largely explained by the COVID-19 death rate and policy stringency. The spread of the pandemic in terms of the death rate has twice as large an effect on healthcare workers’ life satisfaction; on the contrary, the latter are the only workers whose satisfaction was not affected by the stringency of lockdown policies.

We use data from the COME-HERE panel survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of COVID-19 policy responses on disposable incomes in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden between January 2020 and October 2021. Policy responses are measured by the Stringency and Economic Support Indices from the Oxford COVID-19 Government-Response Tracker. Controlling for the evolution of the pandemic itself, we find that the income cost of greater stringency measures is borne only by the most economically vulnerable, while government economic-support measures have a positive effect across the income distribution.

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