ECIN Replication Package for "Locked down in distress: a quasi-experimental estimation of the mental-health fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic"

An
extensive literature documents the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic,
while a nascent one is beginning to detail the mental health impact. A
limitation of existing work is that reported findings generally cannot be taken
as causal estimates. In this study, we use a large-scale longitudinal survey
coupled with a differences-in-differences research design to estimate the
impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the United Kingdom. We
report substantial increases in psychological distress for the population
overall during the first wave. These impacts were, however, not uniformly
distributed with the costs in terms of mental health being much more pronounced
for females, younger cohorts, the BAME community, and migrants. We also looked
beyond socio-demographics to identify characteristics of the individual and
their living environment which can predict who was least resilient to the
mental health effects associated with the first wave. We find that people with
financial worries, feeling lonely or living in overcrowded dwellings
experienced significantly worse mental health deterioration during the first
wave, ceteris paribus.