The pandemic is exacerbating preexisting social and economic inequalities in the United States and abroad, finds a new study from the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University in St. Louis. The study, “Household Spending Patterns and Hardships during COVID-19: A Comparative Study of the U.S. and Israel,” draws on national surveys conducted early in the pandemic to investigate COVID-19’s effects on self-reported consumer spending behaviors and hardship experiences for households in Israel and the U.S., two countries with very different responses to the pandemic.
Co-authors on the study are: Michal Grinstein-Weiss, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and director of the Social Policy Institute; Yung Chun and Olga Kondratjeva, both data analysts at SPI; and Mathieu Despard, associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.
