Mental health concerns have risen significantly in the United Kingdom over recent decades, with
over one in five adults (22.6%) aged 16-64 experiencing common mental health conditions and one in five children (20%) aged 8-16 meeting the criteria for a probable mental disorder in 2023.
This project will investigate how financial stress influences mental health outcomes by exploiting
quasi- experimental designs. To identify causal effects, it will apply advanced quantitative
methods, leveraging UK policy reforms as natural experiments. In particular, the 2012/13 university tuition fee reform and the 2017 two-child benefit cap will be used, as they discretely shifted
budget constraints for specific groups. In addition to estimating their direct effects, the project
will also investigate within-family spillover effects and analyse distributional impacts, with
particular attention to low-income households.
This study will use the novel ECHILD linked administrative dataset, which integrates health,
education, and social care records in England. This linkage enables large-scale, longitudinal
identification of clinically validated mental health conditions among children and adults. By
minimising reliance on self- reported measures, this approach addresses the limited availability of
population-level clinical data on mental health for these groups.
Overall, this project aims to provide robust, replicable evidence on the impacts of financial
stress on mental health, with a focus on vulnerable groups such as children and low-income
households, while also contributing to best practices in large-scale quantitative research.