COVID-19 Pandemic Severity and Changes to Subjective Financial Wellbeing of Older Europeans: Regional Disaggregation of SHARE Data

Michal Taracha, Warsaw School of Economics
Karolina Bolesta, Warsaw School of Economics
Agnieszka Chlon-Dominczak, SGH Warsaw School of Economics

The COVID-19 pandemic and containment measures had multiple consequences on people’s wellbeing, affecting, among others, their financial situation and employment stability. We focus on subjective financial wellbeing of people aged 51+ measured between Wave 7 (2019) and Wave 9 (2022) of the SHARE database, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its relation to pandemic severity, as measured by excess mortality, using multilevel ordered logistic regressions and standard errors clustering. During the analysed period, the average subjective financial wellbeing improved in 93 out of 122 analysed regions. SHARE respondents were assigned with regions from which they were sampled or regions of their historical accommodation in various versions of regional disaggregation. The regional-level mean weekly excess mortality from June 2021 until March 2022 was used as the main explanatory factor. We found that one additional excess death per 10,000 inhabitants in a given region is associated with the probability of worsening of individual’s financial wellbeing higher by 4.88-5.72 percentage points. We also conclude that transition to retirement of unemployed people during the pandemic makes them more resilient in terms of their financial wellbeing. Meanwhile, transition to retirement of people employed before the pandemic outbreak is associated with worsened financial wellbeing in 2022.

Keywords: Mortality and Longevity, Spatial Demography, Multi-level modeling , Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

See paper.