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.

已有大量文献探讨了新冠疫情（COVID-19）对经济的影响，而新兴的研究正逐步细致刻画其对心理健康的冲击。现有研究的一个显著局限在于，其报告的研究结果通常无法被视作因果推断估计值。
本研究采用大规模纵向追踪调查（longitudinal survey）结合双重差分法（differences-in-differences）研究设计，对新冠疫情在英国境内对民众心理健康的影响进行估算。研究发现，在疫情第一波暴发期间，全体民众的心理困扰程度均出现显著上升。但此类影响并未均匀分布：女性、年轻群体、少数族裔群体（BAME）以及移民群体所承受的心理健康成本显著更高。
本研究还跳出社会人口学维度，识别出能够预测哪些个体在疫情第一波冲击下心理健康韧性最弱的个人特征与居住环境因素。研究发现，在其余条件均保持不变的情况下，存在经济顾虑、感到孤独或居住于过度拥挤住房的人群，在疫情第一波期间的心理健康恶化程度显著更严重。