Universal Credit: Welfare reform and mental health.

The UK Universal Credit (UC) welfare reform simplified the benefits system whilst strongly incentivising a return to sustainable employment. Exploiting a staggered roll-out, we estimate the differential effect of unemployment under UC versus the former system on mental health. Groups with fewer insurance possibilities - single adults and lone parents - experience a mental health deterioration of 8.4-13.9% standard deviations which persists into the subsequent year. For couples, UC partially or fully mitigates mental health consequences of unemployment. Exploring mechanisms, for single adults and lone parents, reduced benefit income and strict job search requirements dominate any positive welfare effects of the reduced administrative burden of claiming benefits.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Journal of Health Economics

• Publication date

  2024-11-01

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2139/ssrn.4114738PMID 39541696
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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