Adjust for non-ignorable panel attrition in the analysis of leaving the parental home.

Leaving the parental home is an important life event that has received significant attention in the literature. Research on this topic relies heavily on panel data; however, panel data faces the issue of serious non-ignorable panel attrition associated with leaving the parental home. This paper addresses this issue using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) as a case study. It introduces an adjustment procedure that combines panel gap imputation via the next observation carried backward and inverse probability weighting based on the retrieved information about leaving the parental home. The results show that this adjustment method yields more precise model estimates for leaving the parental home, and after the adjustment, the positive marginal effects of age and living with non-biological parents, as well as the negative marginal effects of Asian ethnicity and regional house prices, become more pronounced. This adjustment method has the potential to be applied to address non-ignorable panel attrition associated with other events in different panel data.

A dynamic microsimulation model for epidemics.

A large evidence base demonstrates that the outcomes of COVID-19 and national and local interventions are not distributed equally across different communities. The need to inform policies and mitigation measures aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 highlights the need to understand the complex links between our daily activities and COVID-19 transmission that reflect the characteristics of British society. As a result of a partnership between academic and private sector researchers, we introduce a novel data driven modelling framework together with a computationally efficient approach to running complex simulation models of this type. We demonstrate the power and spatial flexibility of the framework to assess the effects of different interventions in a case study where the effects of the first UK national lockdown are estimated for the county of Devon. Here we find that an earlier lockdown is estimated to result in a lower peak in COVID-19 cases and 47% fewer infections overall during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The framework we outline here will be crucial in gaining a greater understanding of the effects of policy interventions in different areas and within different populations.