Conflicting economic policies and mental health: Evidence from the UK national living wage and benefits freeze

Akanni, Lateef ORCID: 0000-0002-5495-1173, Lenhart, Otto and Morton, Alec (2024) Conflicting economic policies and mental health: Evidence from the UK national living wage and benefits freeze. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

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Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This study evaluates the mental health effects of two simultaneously implemented but conflicting policies in the UK: the National Living Wage and the benefits freeze policy. We employed the Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) DID estimator to evaluate the heterogeneous policy effects, and we found that NLW leads to positive improvements in mental health. Also, we find the negative impact of the benefits freeze policy constricts the NLW effects. Our result is robust to the sensitivity analysis of the parallel trend assumption and the comparison group definition. Additional results support the psychosocial hypothesis that increased job satisfaction is strongly correlated with improvements in mental health. Also, we found evidence of substitution effects between work hours and leisure. Overall, our findings suggest that the effects of the NLW cannot be understood in isolation from the way the entire suite of policy instruments operates on earnings and liveable income for affected low wage workers.</jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Mental Health, Mental health, 3 Good Health and Well Being
Divisions:	Faculty of Health and Life Sciences Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Population Health
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	16 Apr 2024 10:16
Last Modified:	28 Apr 2024 20:36
DOI:	10.1002/pam.22592
Open Access URL:	https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22592
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3180372