Submitted Abstract
Economic insecurity is widely believed to be on the rise, and to have significant negative consequences on those concerned. This project will advance the existing literature in three ways. First, we perform the fundamental theoretical task of developing improved indices of economic insecurity. Our new measures will be considerably more comprehensive than those currently in use. Employing panel data, we will assess the empirical performance of the new measures in predicting future health and wellbeing outcomes, relative to that of self-reported measures of financial distress. By doing so, we aim to bring the theoretical and empirical analysis of economic insecurity closer together.Our second contribution is to consider intergenerational effects. While the extant literature has investigated the impact of economic insecurity on those concerned, this project will analyze birth-cohort data (where parents and children are simultaneously followed from pre-birth) to establish the relationship between parents’ insecurity and child outcomes. In particular, relationships between pre-birth insecurity and child-birth outcomes, and between a child’s insecurity during the early years of life and her or his situation as an adolescent or a young adult are analyzed.Third, most of the literature has focused on the average effect of insecurity on individual outcomes. This project will adopt a more comprehensive approach by considering the role of resilience. We propose to develop a theoretically sound index of resilience (we are not aware of any such indices in the existing literature), and then apply this index to our panel data in order to explore the determinants of resilience and its effects on insecurity and on individual outcomes.