Below are a list of our current and completed projects.
Current projects
Establishing effective "everyday" personal finance wellbeing approaches
- Effects of SEISS Payment on Entrepreneurship and Risk-taking after the COVID Pandemic
Commenced in 2022
This project explores the financial support offered to those who were self-employed during the Covid 19 pandemic and how this provision is affecting subsequent entrepreneurial decision making. Using Understanding Society’s COVID surveys and sequence analysis approach, this research categorizes self-employed individuals into four distinct groups according to their labour market engagement from January/February 2020 to September 2021, and explores the role of the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) in shaping these labour
market dynamics. We found that the SEISS has contributed significantly to supporting the self-employed during the COVID-19 crisis, and its impact is more pronounced among certain groups of entrepreneurs.Team: Lin Tian, Andy Lymer and Hayley James
Image
- Men and Childcare Costs
Commencing in 2024
This project aims to understand how men with children negotiate and manage childcare costs. In doing so, it will deliver new insights concerning how fathers work with their partners to navigate the burden of childcare costs.
Existing work demonstrates how mothers in heterosexual relationships tend to opt-out of workplace pension saving due to the financial burden of childcare (as well as the labour associated with it) when returning to work. This asymmetry in approach to workplace pension saving has significant implications for the gender pension gap as women lose out on contributions while men continue saving during the initial years of childrearing.
In order to reduce the significant wealth inequalities between men and women, it is important that any policy change understands and targets men’s perspectives. Therefore, this project aims to better understand how fathers of young children in heterosexual relationships navigate the financial burden of childcare costs with their partners through in depth, qualitative research.
Team: Hayley James, Alexus Davis and Andy Lymer
Image
Creating financial resilience
- EMPOWER - Ethnic Minority-led Small and Medium Enterprises
Commenced in April 2024
The Centres for Personal Financial Wellbeing (CPFW) and Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME) at Aston University, the Centre for Business in Society (CBiS) at Coventry University, and Citizen’s UK, have formed a consortium to better understand and build the financial resilience of ethnic minority-led small businesses.
This project brings together a unique mix of researchers and practitioners with expertise and track record in exploring small business ownership and financial resilience, and developing practical solutions to make a difference.
The project aims to better understand the challenges that business founders from minority ethnic backgrounds face when they start and then maintain their ventures.
Using this insight, a suite of interventions with be developed and piloted, focussing on how best to minimise risk to personal and family financial resilience when starting and growing new businesses.
This two year project will produce outputs at regular intervals that will be added to this page and advertised via our social media links, as it progresses.
Partners: CREME, CBiS and Citizen's UKTeam: Andy Lymer, Monder Ram, Sally Dibb, Saidul Haque Saeed, Hussan Aslam and Dixon Wong
Image
- Energy Literacy in the UK
Commenced in 2022
With the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent cost of living crisis, how people manage their use of energy has become a pertinent topic.
This project intends to explore the concept of energy literacy, referring to how individuals understand the energy, carbon and financial implications of their behaviours and habits, amongst the UK population, and its relationship with financial wellbeing in the context of the cost of living crisis.
Team: Hayley James, Lin Tian and Bai Xue
Image
- Poverty Alleviation Strategies – Addressing Wicked Challenges in Personal Finance
Commenced in January 2022
The Centre is working with Birmingham City Council and Malvern Hills District Councils to aid their development of their regional poverty alleviation strategies utilising the principles and practice of addressing wicked challenges.
Following the Covid pandemic many regional and local government bodies are looking at lessons learned over this period for how poverty alleviation approaches could be re-imagined. In this project we work with two such authorities, one with a larger rural context and one in a large UK city, to examine how this process of creating new strategies emerges, but also to provide some support to this process by drawing on the project team’s experience of tackling similar types of wicked problems in other domains.
This project will look at how these strategies are formed, how the wicked problem of poverty alleviation is examined within the authority itself but critically also, how they work in conjunction with their various public, voluntary/charity and third sectors partners who are critical elements to the way poverty is being addressed across the UK.
The project will not only aid these specific councils in their mission to be exemplars of best practice in this area, but also provide a framework for others to consider – particularly in respect to how to partner effectively towards common objectives around problems that are proving very difficult to make significant n rounds into addressing – despite acceptance of the need for these problems to be tackled.
The project involves a series of interviews and also engagement and observation in a series of meetings – in the case of MHDC this includes attending their Financial Wellbeing Partnership meetings over the period of study. This approach, together with regular meetings with MHDC as the client and partner in this work, produces a very rich set of data to draw upon. This is a common approach used by our teams to ensure a suitable depth of analysis can be provided.
Outputs: Conceptual tools for addressing Grand Challenges: A review and guide for busy practitioners
Partners: Birmingham City Council, Malvern Hill District Council
Team: Andy Lymer, Gary Burke and Omid Tehrani
Image
Principles of personal financial wellbeing
- 0% VAT Rate – Exploring who benefits
Commenced in 2022
Image
In collaboration with our associate member Dr. Michael Collins, this project explores the impacts of the use of a 0% VAT and the policy to offer reduce VAT rates on some goods and not others.
It provides a comparative review of how the 0% VAT rate is used in Ireland compared to the UK, in particular seeking to focus on who makes what benefit from this large tax expenditure and whether this is a suitable and effective way to direct support to those in most need where this policy is argued to be, in large part, designed to offset the regressive nature of a VAT that has differential rates.
Outputs: Presentation at the ONS Family Finance Survey Users conference 2022
Presentation at Social Policy Association (SPA) Conference 2021
Team: Michael Collins, Lin Tian and Andy Lymer
- Gender and Financial Wellbeing
Commenced in 2022
In the context of asset-based welfare and financialisation, gendered inequalities in wealth, such as the gender pension gap, draw a stark fault line in the landscape of financial wellbeing. This collection of work aims to better understand how gender shapes how people ‘do’ finance in the course of their everyday lives and how this shapes their financial wellbeing in the present and the future.
Outputs:
Presentation on "Irrational or Rational? Time to Rethink our Understanding of Financially Responsible Behaviour" at CHASM online seminar April 2024
Presentation on "Gender, Lifecourse and Pensions" at CHASM seminar November 2022Team: Hayley James
Image
- Development of Financial Education in South Africa
Commenced in July 2023
In collaboration with our associate member Prof. Bernadene de Clercq to explore the potential for the further development of financial education in South Africa.
As part of a partnership with the University of South Africa (UNISA) where Dr. Andy Lymer is an Honorary Professor, the Centre is providing support to the Financial Sector Conduct Authority of South Africa to engage in a segmentation analysis of a recent survey taken on financial wellbeing from a nationally representative sample of South Africans.
As the South Africa Government department responsible for delivery of improvements in levels of financial education across the country, the UNISA team and the Centre have been commissioned to review the latest nationally representative survey undertaken by the South Africa Government to provide a segmentation analysis specifically seeking to address whether generic or more targeted financial education would be beneficial in improving financial wellbeing across the country.
Partners: Financial Sector Conduct Authority, University of South Africa
Team: Bernadene de Clercq, Lin Tian and Andy Lymer
Image
- Optimising Financial Planning for Owner-Managers
Commenced in June 2024
Small businesses, typically managed by a single shareholder known as an owner-manager, are the engines of economic growth in Western economies. While the personal and business financial goals of these owner-managers may not always be aligned, identifying and addressing them within the framework of business strategy is vital to personal and professional financial success.
The academic and practitioner literature about financial planning has focused on individuals and the decision-making that advances personal and family financial goals. This literature provides a foundation to explore decision-making by owner-managers as they manage and address their interrelated personal and business priorities. As a small business evolves, so do the financial planning needs of its owner-manager. How the owner-manager approaches the integration of personal and business priorities is important to the operation and succession of the business.
The objectives of this project are two-fold. First, to explore whether entrepreneurial owner-managers derive comparable value from financial planning advice as individual decision-makers, particularly as they juggle multiple priorities, and whether they experience similar barriers to seeking advice. Second, to offer practical insights for owner-managers about when to undertake financial planning that integrates personal and business priorities, what elements of the financial planning process are relevant at what times in the business cycle, and how to address these priorities to maximize the opportunities afforded to small business owners as engines for economic growth. These insights aim to support and guide owner-managers in their financial planning journey.
Team: Christopher Gorman and Andy Lymer
