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The authors track the well-being of individuals across five European countries during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and relate their well-being to working from home. The authors also consider the role of pandemic-policy stringency in affecting well-being in Europe.

The authors have four waves of novel harmonised longitudinal data in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden, covering the period May–November 2020. Well-being is measured in five dimensions: life satisfaction, a worthwhile life, loneliness, depression and anxiety. A retrospective diary indicates whether the individual was working in each month since February 2020 and if so whether at home or not at home. Policy stringency is matched in per country at the daily level. The authors consider both cross-section and panel regressions and the mediating and moderating effects of control variables, including household variables and income.

Well-being among workers is lower for those who work from home, and those who are not working have the lowest well-being of all. The panel results are more mitigated, with switching into working at home yielding a small drop in anxiety. The panel and cross-section difference could reflect adaptation or the selection of certain types of individuals into working at home. Policy stringency is always negatively correlated with well-being. The authors find no mediation effects. The well-being penalty from working at home is larger for the older, the better-educated, those with young children and those with more crowded housing.

The harmonised cross-country panel data on individuals' experiences during COVID-19 are novel. The authors relate working from home and policy stringency to multiple well-being measures. The authors emphasise the effect of working from home on not only the level of well-being but also its distribution.

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. Second, poverty scars: those who have been poor in the past report lower life satisfaction today, even when out of poverty. Last, the order of poverty spells matters: for a given number of years in poverty, satisfaction is lower when the years are linked together. As such, poverty persistence reduces well-being. These effects differ by population subgroups.

This article axiomatically derives a class of numerical indices of integration (equality) in the distribution of different types of workers across occupations. The associated segregation (inequality) indices parallel one form of multidimensional generalized Gini inequality indices. A comparison is made with the other Gini-related segregation indices. A numerical illustration of the family of indices is also provided using US occupational data.

Using real-time data from the University of Luxembourg’s COME-HERE nationally representative panel survey, covering more than 8,000 individuals across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, the author investigates how income distributions and poverty rates have changed from January to September 2020. The author finds that poverty rates increased on average in all countries from January to May and partially recovered in September. The increase in poverty is heterogeneous across countries, with Italy being the most affected and France the least; within countries, COVID-19 contributed to exacerbating poverty differences across regions in Italy and Spain. With a set of poverty measures from the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke family, the author then explores the role of individual characteristics in shaping different poverty profiles across countries. Results suggest that poverty increased disproportionately more for young individuals, women, and respondents who had a job in January 2020 – with different intensities across countries.

Although the measurement of segregation by gender or ethnic group in the labor force has long been of interest to both sociologists and economists, the sociology and economics literatures on this topic have evolved in different ways and remained largely separate. This has also been the case to some extent with research on the measurement of residential segregation. Although much of the segregation measurement literature is in sociology and geography, economists have contributed to this field as well, particularly in the development of measures of residential income segregation. Again, however, the economics literature has remained largely separate from that in geography and sociology.