Social restrictions, leisure and well-being

Francesca Foliano, Valentina Tonei and Almudena Sevilla

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: A wide-ranging public debate surrounds how pandemic lockdown measures differentially impacted individuals and which precise mechanisms – whether financial-, health-, or policy-driven – predominate in determining these effects. Using a nationally representative 24-h diary survey covering the first two years of the pandemic, we explore potential mechanisms underlying changes in well-being. We exploit the variation in the stringency of the social restrictions implemented by the UK government during this period and use an event-study methodology to net out the impact of social restrictions from other pandemic effects. We find that well-being dropped by 47 % (for men) and 71 % (for women) of a standard deviation during the strictest lockdown and that it took longer to revert to pre-pandemic levels than previously estimated. This finding holds after we account for financial conditions and changes in local infection and death rates, suggesting that the time use–related changes driven by social restrictions dominate financial and health shocks in driving the overall well-being effects during the pandemic. Our detailed data on time allocation and individual preferences over the activities undertaken throughout the day suggest that the drop in well-being was primarily associated to a drastic reduction in time spent in leisure with non–household members or outside the home, a category with greater weight in the well-being of women.

Keywords: well-being; life satisfaction; social isolation; time use; instantaneous enjoyment; Covid-19; coronavirus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2024-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Labour Economics, 1, April, 2024, 87. ISSN: 0927-5371

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/121996/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social restrictions, leisure and well-being (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:121996

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager (lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk).