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COVID-19 arrived in the UK early in March 2020. By 23rd March 2020, the UK experienced the first national lockdown. As businesses and livelihoods stalled, an unprecedented number of applications were made for Universal Credit (UC). Drawing on data from the most comprehensive national study examining working-age benefits — i.e. Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) and Universal Credit (UC) — during the pandemic, this report provides an understanding of the experiences of benefit claimants during the first wave of COVID-19.

There has been much scrutiny of the British benefits system during COVID-19, and most experts agree that the benefits system has performed well, even if historic weaknesses remain. Yet little attention has been paid to those who start a claim that is ultimately not successful. This report focuses on these ‘unsuccessful claimants’, using new YouGov survey data and interviews funded by the Health Foundation.\ud Unsuccessful claimants raise two policy issues. Firstly, some claims are unsuccessful because of problems with the process of claiming benefits. Did the changes made by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in response to COVID-19 ensure that everyone could navigate the system? Secondly, some claims are unsuccessful because of the design of the benefits system: these people are not eligible for benefits. This reflects decisions by policymakers about the purpose of a policy and how this can best be achieved, balanced against wider impacts including poverty, health and wellbeing; the public finances; and the wider economy.

This report presents the first findings from the Welfare at a (Social) Distance project,\ud a major national research project investigating the benefits system during the COVID19 pandemic, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of UK\ud Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19. It draws upon a new survey of\ud 2,364 new Universal Credit (UC)/Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA) claimants (carried out\ud between 25th May and 3rd June) to look at how far benefit claimants are connected to\ud the world of work, helping to better understand the emerging picture from recent UK\ud labour market statistics.

This paper adopts a counterfactual decomposition analysis to analyse cross-country differences in the size of household wealth and levels of household wealth inequality. The findings of the paper suggest that the biggest share of cross-country differences is not due to differences in the distribution of household demographic and economic characteristics but rather reflect strong unobserved country effects.

In this paper we compare the level, composition and distribution of household wealth in five industrial countries: the UK, US, Italy, Finland and Sweden. We exploit the harmonized data within the Luxembourg Wealth Study, which we have extended to allow us to examine trends in the UK and the US between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. Remaining differences between surveys, variable definitions and coverage are highlighted to the extent that they impact on cross-country comparisons. We find that the Nordic countries have lower average wealth holdings, smaller absolute gaps between low wealth and high wealth households but high relative measures of wealth inequality. Italian households hold very little debt and are much more likely to own their homes outright, leading to relatively high median levels of wealth. In contrast American households tend to hold much more housing debt well into retirement. Increases in owner occupation and house prices 2000-05 in the UK has led to substantial increases in wealth, particularly median wealth holdings and this had led to falls in relative measures of wealth inequality such as the Gini coefficient even though absolute gaps between high and low wealth households have grown substantially. We show that there are underlying country differences in terms of distributions of age, household composition, educational attainment and income as well as wealth and debt portfolios. Educational loans are increasing in their size and prevalence in some countries and look set to create some marked differences in the distribution of wealth for different age cohorts.

This paper presents the first UK estimates of the association between parental wealth during adolescence and a range of children’s outcomes in early adulthood. Parental wealth is positively associated with all outcomes examined (which include educational attainment, employment, earnings and homeownership). The estimated associations are found to operate over and above parental education and income and in many cases are stronger than them. For labour market outcomes a small share of the association reflects the indirect effect of parental wealth on children’s education whereas for homeownership the estimated association appear to mainly reflect the effect of parental wealth transfers. Further analysis by wealth component shows that degree attainment is more strongly associated with housing wealth than financial wealth. However, important effects are also estimated for financial wealth indicating the existence of financial constraints for low wealth-financial indebted households. For homeownership and earnings the estimated association are stronger for financial wealth. JEL: D1, D3, I21, J62, J31