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We provide evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial hate crime in England and Wales. Using various data sources, including unique data collected through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from UK police forces, a difference-in-difference and event study approaches, we find that racial hate crime against East Asians increased by 70-100%, beginning in early February and persisted until November 2020. This effect was greatest in weeks leading up to the first national lockdown in the UK. The shock was then lower during lockdown, before increasing again in the summer 2020. We present evidence that hate crime increased as COVID-19 cases in China increased and following announcements from the government signalling that China or Chinese individuals posed a public health risk to the UK. This indicates that protectionism played an important role in the observed hate crime spike. The hate crime shock was also positively correlated with the salience of the national lockdown and government policies restricting certain freedoms. The effect was driven largely by changes in London. This suggests that retaliation further contributed to the rise in hate crime.

University students’ smartphone use has recently been shown to negatively affect their academic performance. Surprisingly, research testing the empirical validity of potential mechanisms underlying this relationship is very limited. In particular, indirect effects of negative health consequences due to heavy smartphone use have never been investigated. To fill this gap, we investigate, for the first time, whether deteriorated sleep quality drives the negative impact on academic performance. To this end, we examine longitudinal data on 1,635 students at two major Belgian universities. Based on a combination of a random effects approach and seemingly unrelated regression, we find no statistically significant mediating effect of sleep quality in the relationship between smartphone use and academic performance.

This paper develops a novel and tractable empirical approach to estimate the cycle in schooling participation decisions, which we denominate the schooling cycle. The estimation procedure is based on unobserved components time series models that decompose higher education enrollment rates into a slow-moving stochastic trend and a stationary cyclical factor. By doing so, we obtain a full characterization of the cyclical dynamics of schooling participation and analyze its relationship with the business cycle in a time-varying fashion. Using data for 16–24-year-olds attending full-time post-secondary education in the United Kingdom from 1995Q1 to 2019Q4, we find evidence of a very persistent schooling cycle largely, but not exclusively, explained by the business cycle. Additionally, we find that the direction of the response of schooling participation to the business cycle, say, pro-, counter- or a-cyclical, is largely time-dependent, as is the degree of synchrony between both cycles. We note, however, that results are heterogeneous across gender.

Over the recent years the EU referendum in the UK and global shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have raised the saliency of racial or ethnic minority groups. This thesis looks at how these events impacted racial hate crime, including the magnitude and persistence of the shocks and the mechanisms driving the observed changes. With this information policy makers will better be able to prevent or respond to hate crime shocks. Hate crime is of particular concern to society due to the detrimental effects on the direct victim and the larger targeted community, such as high mental health costs, reduced assimilation, and changes in appearance and mobility to prevent future victimization. The first chapter studies the effect of the EU Referendum on racial and religious hate crime in England and Wales. We find that hate crime increased by 20 percent only in June 2016. The shock, however, was temporary due to the announcement of an increase in sentencing and public outcry to the reported hate crime spike. In Chapter 2, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on hate crime in the UK is analyzed. Here we find a persistent increase in hate crime against East Asians in 2020 beginning with the first UK COVID cases. Hate crimes against other ethnic groups increased following the end of the first national lockdown. Lockdown appears to be the driving force as the shock was predominately in London. Chapter 3 examines the effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests on racial hate crime in the US. Immediately following the death of George Floyd there was a large and persistent increase in anti-Black and anti-White hate crime. The spread of the protests to areas without a history of BLM protests drove the increase in hate crime as did the saliency of police violence against protestors and opposition to BLM. The public response to the events and resultant shocks seems to be a critical determinant of the level and duration of the hate crime increase. With Brexit there was a consensus among those with authority across the political spectrum and a clear denouncement of hate crime compounded with an increase in criminal justice consequences. In comparison, race played an enduring and contentious role in the latter two events which sustained a long-lasting hate crime surge. This thesis has two important implications for future research on hate crime. First, just as non-biased crime, hate crime is at least partially determined by society and therefore there is scope for public policy as an instrument to reduce its occurrence. Finally, reliable and rich hate crime data from more countries is required to have a deeper understanding of the causes of hate crime and how to prevent it.

The collection of papers in this book study human capital and welfare from different perspectives and offer new insights on determinants of human capital accumulation and the importance of welfare states for economic development. The first six chapter in the book study phenomena of human capital while the last three chapters focus on welfare The first chapter studies youth policy preferences for public spending in the EU and compares them to middle-aged population. Chapter two aims to characterise youth not in employment, education and training in Serbia, while chapter three studies a program implemented in Serbian secondary schools which helped pupils in their school- to-work transition. Chapter four takes a different perspective at youth and it studies their entrepreneurial intentions. In chapter five the authors study the impact of over- and under-education on the wage penalty. Chapter six explores whether the usage of smartphones has a detrimental effect on academic performance. The second part of the book studies welfare issues. Chapter seven studies hybrid organizations and aims to characterise an enabling ecosystem for such organisations. Chapter eight studies the important topic of child poverty in four countries. The chapter nine compares welfare regimes in OECD countries and studies how they affect inequality.