The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housing wealth compared to older cohorts from the same background. Our findings infer the intergenerational rank correlation in housing wealth is set to double in approximately three decades.

Before the Omicron variant ran amok inside China in November 2022, the Chinese central government’s dynamic zero-COVID policy effectively contained the spread of the coronavirus and its variants during multiple waves of outbreaks. However, it was not without cost. This study examines the impacts of stringent lockdown interventions on urban residents’ mental health during the initial outbreak of the Omicron variant in the spring of 2022. Using survey data from 522 respondents within the same neighbourhood and a spatial quasi-experimental design, the results show that strict lockdown interventions are significantly related to higher levels of psychological distress after controlling for observed confounders and that lockdown interventions have further spillover effects on mental health for residents in adjacent residential compounds who are otherwise free. Moreover, the results show that the lack of material supplies and medical care plays a more salient role in explaining lockdown effects on psychological distress than residents’ social interaction and trust levels of COVID-19 policy. Policy and intervention implications are also discussed.

Existing literature shows the importance of maternity leave as a strategy for women to balance work and family responsibilities. However, only a few studies focused on the long-run impact of maternity leave length on maternal health. Therefore, how exactly they are related remains unclear. We examine women’s selection into different lengths of maternity leave as a potential explanation for the inconclusive findings in the literature on the association between maternity leave and maternal health. This study aims to unravel the association between maternity leave length and mothers’ long-term health in Germany. Drawing on detailed data from the German Statutory Pension Fund (DRV), we estimated the association between maternity leave length and sick leave from 3 years following their child’s birth for 4,243 women living in Germany in 2015 by applying discrete-time logistic regression. Our results show a negative relationship between maternity-leave length and long-term maternal health, likely driven by negative health selection. Long maternity leaves of more than 24 months were associated with worse maternal health in the long run, while a positive association emerged for vulnerable women with pre-existing health problems.

The media are often blamed for widespread perceptions that welfare benefit claimants are undeserving in Anglo-Saxon countries – yet people rarely justify their views through media stories, instead saying that they themselves know undeserving claimants. In this paper, I explain this contradiction by hypothesising that the media shapes how we interpret ambiguous interpersonal contact. I focus on disability benefit claimants, which is an ideal case given that disability is often externally unobservable, and test three hypotheses over three studies (all using a purpose-collected survey in the UK and Norway, n=3,836). In Study 1, I find strong evidence that a randomly-assigned ‘benefits cheat’ story leads respondents to interpret a hypothetical disability claimant as less deserving. Study 2 examines people’s judgements in everyday life, finding that readers of more negative newspapers in the UK are much more likely to judge neighbours as non-genuine – but with effectively no impact on judgements of close family claimants, where ambiguity is lower. However, contra my expectations, in Study 3 I find that Britons are no more likely than Norwegians to perceive known claimants as non-genuine (despite more negative welfare discourses), partly because of different conceptions of what ‘non-genuineness’ means in the two countries.

Looking at core features of child and family related spending and policy design, and covering five domains of policy, the paper offers new empirical evidence and an original perspective for better understanding how EU countries and the UK responded to the needs of children and families during the pandemic and how to classify responses in terms of child-centredness. The paper is driven by a concept of child-centredness to examine developments from March to December 2020 in five policy fields: income support, food assistance, early childcare and education services, school opening and support for parental care-giving. The analysis shows strong variation across countries in terms of how active they were and what fields they were active in. One very striking commonality, though, is that the most popular field of policy action was in resourcing parental care of children at home, through paid leaves usually. A related finding is that there was little prioritising of children for most kinds of actions. Thirdly, in terms of national patterning those countries that were generous spenders on this field of policy prior to the pandemic were most child-centred in their response and there are few if any exceptions to this.

The body of research on the take-up of social benefits is growing, but rarely focuses on universal cash benefits, especially in the field of long-term care. This paper is concerned with the long-term care (LTC) allowance in Austria, a universal cash benefit paid to those in need of LTC on seven different levels of dependency. It investigates whether take-up and distribution of the benefit reflect need in terms of age structure and health status of the population, and examines whether local variations in the distribution of benefits can be explained with socio-demographic variables. Combining administrative data on recipients and socio-demographic data on the municipal level with health information shows that higher levels of education and a higher share of foreigners are associated with a lower share of recipients, while a lower average household size increases the share of recipients. Overall, these variations are much stronger for lower levels of care needs than for higher ones. The results suggest variations in take-up that are determined either by non-application (in particular among lower levels of care needs) or discretion and potentially discrimination in the process of claiming the benefit.

The author makes the case that wealth inequality ramifies in the communicative practices of policymaking in ways which produce specific forms of epistemic injustice. Relative epistemic authority between richer and poorer knowers is established by limiting some speakers to being sources of information, and elevating others to the epistemically more sophisticated role of inquirer. In its systemic form, this differentiation has the effect of re-producing and maintaining ‘tracker prejudices’ (Fricker, 2007) and ‘tracker privileges’ (Medina, 2011) which then ramify in relational and distributive inequality (Fricker, 2016). The article suggests that in a context in which the inclusion of ‘lived experience’ has come to be seen as an intrinsic good in policy discourse (Smith-Merry, 2020), the lived experience we need to amplify isn’t that of the poor, it is that of the rich. Only in centring rich voices in social policymaking can we reveal and challenge the operation of wealth privilege and advance reparatory forms of epistemic practice.1

Informal caregivers are the core of long-term care for older and disabled people. Although previous research has studied factors that influence caregivers’ burden, little is known about the different care domains and why they influence the caregivers’ perceived burden. Drawing on a large-scale German survey, the current study makes a first attempt to address this research gap. The study used cross-sectional data on 1.429 informal caregivers. Germany is characterized by comprehensive but fragmented health and social protection systems oriented toward supporting informal care at home. Structural equation modeling (SmartPLS 3) was used to estimate the effects of five care domains on three burden dimensions and, ultimately, on the overall burden. Our results indicate that support in organizational matters had the highest impact on the overall perceived burden. The findings reveal that German caregivers particularly struggle with bureaucracy, i.e. an area that can directly be influenced by policymakers.

Passported benefits are additional benefits provided to individual or households based on a previous eligibility to a “primary” social security benefit. Although passported benefits should be easier to claim, in reality the claiming process is often cumbersome and results in low take-up. Drawing on an Israeli case study, we offer a conceptual framework to categorize and analyse the varieties of passported benefits along five dimensions: the eligibility role of primary cash benefits; automation level; legal status; type of service delivery; and the degree of decentralization. The administrative burden literature is employed to make sense of the paradox of passported benefits becoming a site for administrative burden. Using our conceptual framework and drawing on interviews with officials and claimants, we demonstrate why some passported benefits are more user-friendly while others tend to become administratively burdensome.

Since 1997, the Canadian province of Quebec has put in place a heavily subsidized universal childcare program for all children under the school age. The present paper examines how the level of competition among individual providers associates with the quality of childcare in Quebec. The quality of childcare is measured by the number of violations and penalties recorded in the inspections conducted by the Quebec Ministry of Family Affairs. The analysis indicates that the intensity of parental competition for daycare spots, as opposed to childcare centres’ competition to attract parents, negatively associates with the quality of childcare. Critically, this association is mainly driven by less affluent neighbourhoods. In addition, these associations are found to be stronger for more serious violations. The policy implications for both childcare quality and childcare equality are discussed.

Since the early years of activation and workfare in the 1990s, the use of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions has been proposed among the necessary solutions to ensure the efficiency of welfare policy by reinforcing individual economic incentives. Using rich administrative registers from Norway, we produce micro-level quantitative evidence on compulsory activation for young recipients of social assistance. The empirical challenge is that activation through the threat of benefit sanctions is not a feature that unambiguously emerges from observational data, except for when sanctions indeed take place and benefits are reduced. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a novel methodology to identify individual-level effects of activation on young welfare recipients, exploiting municipal variation in the introduction of compulsory activation. More precisely, we study whether individuals who are residents in municipalities that have introduced compulsory activation display a stronger relationship between their labor market status (activation) and their benefit size (because sanctions being in place) compared to individuals residing in municipalities where activation has not been made compulsory. Our results show that there is no different relationship between social assistance benefits and passive labor market status for individuals living in municipalities that practice activation compared with individuals residing in municipalities in which activation is not yet mandatory. In other words, there is no visible effect of sanctions for passive recipients.

The central idea in trust-reform is to improve service delivery by granting professional autonomy and acknowledging the experiential knowledge of professionals. In this article, we study trust-reform bottom-up from the perspective of frontline care workers. Our aim is to discuss the challenges for care work and care workers who have been organised in self-managing teams, paying particular attention to the organising of the daily work in the teams. This study draws on data from four months of fieldwork in Norwegian municipal home care services for older people. The article sheds light on some problematic aspects in trust-reform regarding the relationship between frontline workers’ autonomy and responsibility on the one hand and the lack of authority and managerial support on the other hand. The study demonstrates that trust-reforms within public service delivery can be experienced as delegation of logistical tasks and enhanced responsibility instead of delegation of the authority that is necessary for professional care work to be performed. As such, trust-reforms risk obstructing rather than advancing their declared intentions of strengthening professional agency in care work, and rather than distributing management tasks, trust-reforms need to strengthen the management function in order to succeed.

Retirement timing is an issue of great political importance these days. Policy-makers develop various initiatives encouraging workers to postpone retirement beyond the statutory retirement age. This effort brings, however, just minimal outcomes. Although increasing opportunities and abilities to work in old age, in some countries people tend to retire as soon as it is possible. In economic terms, they make suboptimal (irrational) decisions.

Over recent years, a preventative approach has been promoted within adult social care policy and practice in England. However, progress has been somewhat inconsistent, in part due to issues around conceptualising what exactly prevention means within this context. Particularly since the financial crisis, there have emerged tensions between seeing prevention as a positive strategy to build assets and capability; as part of a neo-liberal project to roll back expectations for state support; or simply as a technocratic strategy to increase efficiency by deploying resources ‘upstream’ where they might have greater impact. This paper provides a critical perspective on how policy has unfolded over the last 15 years, which provides the context for an analysis of findings from a national survey of English local authorities and interviews with key stakeholders. These findings demonstrate a substantial commitment to preventative activity, but also some serious confusions and contradictions in how this agenda may be taken forward in the current policy environment.

Employer engagement with active labour market programmes (ALMPs) and related employability projects is seen as vital to their ‘success’. However, the role of employers remains under-researched – a gap which widens in relation to non-governmental programmes led by not-for-profit, third-sector organisations (TSOs). Recent studies suggest that engaging employers may depend on addressing both human resource (HR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) ‘logics’ and linking the roles of ‘gatekeeper to jobs’ and ‘proactive strategic partner’. A key question is whether TSO-led programmes are better placed to combine these logics and roles in engaging employers to help vulnerable groups into decent sustainable employment. The article explores this through a case study of two projects in England. The findings highlight the challenges that TSOs face in having to appeal almost exclusively to a CSR logic and explores why this is the case.

We investigate the labour market effects of incarcerating children. Using linked administrative data to track outcomes for English schoolchildren, we estimate an econometric model of transitions between education, custody, employment and NEET (not in employment, education or training), along with earnings for those starting work. We allow outcomes to vary according to the individual’s state in the preceding spell and, by controlling for personal characteristics and unobserved heterogeneity, interpret such variation as capturing causal impacts. For males, the main effect of incarceration is a reduction of more than 10% in the probability of employment. For females, there is no overall impact on employment but, for those entering work, wages are reduced by 25%. These negative impacts suggest roles for policy in deterring delinquency, finding alternatives to custody, rehabilitating those incarcerated and supporting resettlement on release. Appropriate labour market policy may differ by gender, with males needing help to overcome employer discrimination and females needing encouragement to achieve better-paid work.

Young people experience different treatment compared to older adults in the English welfare and homelessness systems, encountering varying levels of protection and disadvantage. This paper uses a value-pluralist perspective to explore the normative rationales for and the ethical defensibility of these policy differences. Evidence from 38 key informant interviews suggests that the English homelessness system is shifting towards a vulnerability-oriented response to young people. But an inconsistent value framework within the welfare system systematically disadvantages them without offering a corresponding degree of protection. As such, these closely-connected areas of social policy pull in opposing directions. Although individual positions targeting young people may (to greater and lesser extents) be justifiable, this disparity in values creates an incoherent and indefensible welfare policy landscape for this group.