COVID-19 and Subjective Well-Being: Separating the Effects of Lockdowns from the Pandemic

Abstract

Scholars, journalists, and policymakers have raised concerns that lockdown policies implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic may be damaging to mental health. However, existing evidence for this claim is confounded by an inability to separate the mental health effects of lockdowns from those of the pandemic. We address this issue using one year of weekly mood surveys from Great Britain, together with weekly cross-country data from Google Trends. While we find a clear negative impact on mental health from the pandemic, lockdown measures are mostly associated with improvements in subjective well-being. Multilevel models, which estimate the changing effects among demographics by survey week, suggest the largest relative gains occurred among lower socioeconomic status groups.