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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.

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.

While an extensive literature investigates the effects of longer schooling, we know very little about what happens when compulsory schooling is shortened. This paper looks at the effects of a reform in Hungary that decreased the school leaving age from 18 to 16. We show that the reform increased the probability of being neither in education nor in employment and being inactive at ages 16-18 substantially while its effects on employment are not significantly different from zero in most specifications. These effects are similar among boys and girls but strongly heterogeneous by social background and ability. The reform had a moderate effect on teenage motherhood on average, but it increased the probability of giving birth substantially among the most disadvantaged girls. We conclude that through its heterogenous effects, the reform is expected to widen social inequalities.

Elite occupations are characterised by the magnitude of income accumulation which has been particularly exacerbated in the financialisation process. This paper however shows that the cumulative effects on group earnings is a pattern visible across the labour force. The case studies on the US and UK labour force in the financialisation era in effect show that elitist earnings are a group phenomenon for a dominant group, mainly white male or female, at the expense of other racial, ethnic, and gender groups. Learning from such group behaviour on financial accumulation and drawing on Sen’s rules of legitimacy (1981) in market interactions, the discussion then looks at the possibility of “sustainable earning” trends that feed into the financial needs for the green transition. The paper concludes that economic actors should be aware of the group legitimacy to financial flows, but that the group boundaries should be based on ecological-based entitlements rather than social-based entitlements to financial flows.

We investigate whether, why and when prosocial engagement has a causal effect on individual employment opportunities. To this end, a field experiment is conducted in which volunteering activities are randomly assigned to fictitious job applications sent to genuine vacancies. We find that volunteers get one third more interview invitations than non‐volunteers. The volunteering premium is higher for females but invariant with respect to the number of engagements and the private versus public or nonprofit orientation of the job posting firm. As a result, our findings are consistent with the idea that prosocial workers sort themselves into non‐commercial sectors.

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29% less than their male colleagues, above the average UK gender pay gap of 19%. We estimate the adjusted pay gap to be about 23% after controlling for a range of demographic, human capital and job characteristics, as well as personal preferences and values. These differences are hard to explain by discrimination since these CEOs set their own pay. Income may not be the only aim in an entrepreneurial career, so we also look at job satisfaction to proxy for nonmonetary returns. We find female social entrepreneurs to be more satisfied with their job as a CEO of a social enterprise than their male counterparts. This result holds even when we control for the salary generated through the social enterprise. Our results extend research in labour economics on the gender pay gap as well as entrepreneurship research on women’s entrepreneurship to the novel context of social enterprise. It provides the first evidence for a “contented female social entrepreneur” paradox.

In this paper, we present evidence on empirical connections between crime and education, using various data sources from Britain. A robust finding is that criminal activity is negatively associated with higher levels of education. However, it is essential to ensure that the direction of causation flows from education to crime. Therefore, we identify the effect of education on participation in criminal activity using changes in compulsory school leaving age laws over time to account for the endogeneity of education. In this causal approach, for property crimes, the negative crime-education relationship remains strong and significant. The implications of these findings are unambiguous and clear. They show that improving education can yield significant social benefits and can be a key policy tool in the drive to reduce crime.

This paper estimates the longer-term effects of childhood conduct disorder on human capital accumulation and violent and criminal behaviour later in life using data of Australian twins. We measure conduct disorder with a rich set of indicators based on diagnostic criteria from psychiatry (e.g., aggression to people and animals, destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, and/or serious violations of rules). Using ordinary least squares (OLS) and twin fixed effects (FE) estimation approaches, we find that early (pre-18) conduct disorder problems significantly affect both human capital accumulation and violent and criminal behaviour over the life course. For instance, within pairs of identical twins we find that conduct disorder reduces the probability of high school graduation with 4 to 13 percent points and increases the probability of being arrested with 7 to 16 percent points. Robustness checks suggest that these estimates may be lower bounds of the true effects of conduct disorder. In addition, we find that conduct disorder is more deleterious if these behaviours occur earlier in life. We conclude that childhood mental health problems have high human and financial costs for families and society at large. Effective treatments early in life might yield high returns.