University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
PARIS School of Economics - CNRS and University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
Econ Hum Biol. 2024 Dec;55:101427. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2024.101427. Epub 2024 Aug 20.
We use quarterly panel data from the COME-HERE survey covering five European countries to analyse three facets of the experience of loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, in terms of prevalence, loneliness peaked in April 2020, followed by a U-shape pattern in the rest of 2020, and then remained relatively stable throughout 2021 and 2022. We then establish the individual determinants of loneliness and compare them to those found in the literature predating the COVID-19 pandemic. As in previous work, women are lonelier, and partnership, education, income, and employment protect against loneliness. However, the pandemic substantially shifted the age profile: it is now the youngest who are the loneliest. We last show that pandemic policies affected loneliness, which rose with containment policies but fell with government economic support. Conversely, the intensity of the pandemic itself, via the number of recent COVID-19 deaths, had only a minor impact. The experience of the pandemic has thus shown that public policy can influence societal loneliness trends.
我们使用来自五个欧洲国家的 COME-HERE 调查的季度面板数据，分析了 COVID-19 大流行期间孤独感的三个方面。首先，就流行程度而言，孤独感在 2020 年 4 月达到峰值，随后在 2020 年剩余时间呈 U 形模式，然后在 2021 年和 2022 年保持相对稳定。然后，我们确定了孤独感的个体决定因素，并将其与 COVID-19 大流行前文献中的发现进行了比较。与之前的工作一样，女性更孤独，而伴侣关系、教育、收入和就业可以预防孤独感。然而，大流行极大地改变了年龄分布：现在最年轻的人最孤独。最后，我们表明大流行政策会影响孤独感，而隔离政策会增加孤独感，而政府的经济支持则会降低孤独感。相反，通过最近 COVID-19 死亡人数，大流行本身的强度只产生了较小的影响。大流行的经历表明，公共政策可以影响社会孤独趋势。
