Documents Wang, Senhu 3 results

"Active Labour Market Programmes (ALMPs), which form important components of employment support policies around the world, have been found to improve mental health and wellbeing of participants. However, it remains unclear how these health effects compare with the effects of different types of employment for men and women. Using 1991–2019 panel data in the UK, we find that unemployed women derive similar mental health benefits from ALMPs compared with employment. Unemployed men also benefit from ALMPs but obtain significantly more health benefits from formal employment. Such benefits are particularly pronounced in full-time, permanent and upper/middle-status jobs. Further analyses reveal that programmes that deliver human capital training have larger mental health benefits than employment assistance ALMPs. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the mental health impacts of ALMPs compared with different types of employment, and highlight the need for a more gender-sensitive design in labour market interventions."

"Although reduced working time and furlough policy initiatives are widely regarded as important for economic and business reasons, little is known about their impacts on workers' mental health at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Panel Study data from 2018 to February 2020 and April 2020 and change score analysis, this study aims to compare mental health changes between those who worked reduced hours, were furloughed and left/lost paid work. The results suggest that at the onset of COVID-19 reduced working time and furlough can protect workers' mental health, but only for men not for women. The gender differences remain significant even after controlling for housework and childcare responsibilities at the onset of COVID-19. These results highlight the importance of distributing paid work more equitably and formulating gender-sensitive labour market policies in protection of workers' mental health."

"Despite widely-reported ethnicity disparities in pay and occupational attainment, little is known about how different ethnic groups fare in job control—a crucial component of job quality with significant implications for well-being and health. Drawing on two large-scale representative datasets in the United Kingdom (1992–2022), we find that workers from all Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups conditionally report significantly lower job control than their White British counterparts, although heterogeneity exists depending on the BAME group in question. Ethnicity penalties are also most pronounced for foreign-born workers. Despite a slow trend towards convergence, ethnicity disparities have remained significant over the last three decades. We further show that disparities are largely unexplained by compositional factors such as pay and occupation, demonstrating ethnicity penalties in job control. By linking ethnicity to job control, this study contributes to the growing research on BAME workers in the labour market, as well as the literatures on job quality and multisegmented labour markets."