CPFW 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

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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

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 Creating financial resilience

EMPOWER

Commenced in April 2024

A joint research project with the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME), the Centre for Business in Society at Coventry University and Citizens UK funded by the Aviva Foundation. Find out more on the project page.

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

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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

First year report –  Alleviating poverty collaboratively: A review of the Malvern Hills District Financial Wellbeing Partnership

Partners: Birmingham City Council, Malvern Hill District Council

Team: Andy Lymer, Gary Burke and Omid Tehrani

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Principles of personal financial wellbeing 

0% VAT Rate – Exploring who benefits

Commenced in 2022

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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 2022

Podcast

Team: Hayley James

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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

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Completed Projects