SHARE-ENV: A Data Set to Advance Our Knowledge of the Environment-Wellbeing Relationship.

Climate change interacts with other environmental stressors and vulnerability factors. Some places and, owing to socioeconomic conditions, some people, are far more at risk. The data behind current assessments of the environment-wellbeing nexus is coarse and regionally aggregated, when considering multiple regions/groups; or, when granular, comes from ad hoc samples with few variables. To assess the impacts of climate change, we require data that are granular and comprehensive, both in the variables and population studied. We build a publicly accessible data set, the SHARE-ENV data set, which fulfills these criteria. We expand on EU representative, individual-level, longitudinal data (the SHARE survey), with environmental exposure information about temperature, radiation, precipitation, pollution, and flood events. We illustrate through four simplified multilevel linear regressions, cross-sectional and longitudinal, how full-fledged studies can use SHARE-ENV to contribute to the literature. Such studies would help assess climate impacts and estimate the effectiveness and fairness of several climate adaptation policies. Other surveys can be expanded with environmental information to unlock different research avenues.

Living with Reduced Income: An Analysis of Household Financial Vulnerability Under COVID-19.

The COVID-19 crisis has led to substantial reductions in earnings. We propose a new measure of financial vulnerability, computable through survey data, to determine whether households can withstand a certain income shock for a defined period of time. Using data from the ECB Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) we analyse financial vulnerability in seven EU countries. We find that, out of the 243 million individuals considered, 47 million are vulnerable to a three month long income shock (the average length of the first wave COVID-19 lockdown), i.e., they cannot afford food and housing expenses for three months without privately earned income. Differences across countries are stark. Individuals born outside the EU are especially likely to be vulnerable. Being younger, a single parent, and a woman are also statistically significant risk factors. Through a tax-benefit microsimulation exercise, we look into the COVID-19 employment protection benefits, the largest income support measure in the countries considered. Considering as our sample individuals in households where someone receives a salary, we derive household net income when employees are laid-off and awarded the COVID-19 employment protection benefits enacted. Our findings suggest that the employment protection schemes are extremely effective in reducing the number of vulnerable individuals. The relative importance of rent and mortgage suspensions, (likewise, widespread COVID-19 policies), in alleviating vulnerability, is highly country dependent.