WP22/12: Trends and life-course persistence in accumulated disadvantages

Working Paper 22/12

Signe Hald Andersen
Leah Richmond-Rakerd
Stephanie D’Souza
Barry Milne

In a recent paper by our research team (Richmond-Rakerd, et al., 2020), we demonstrated that in both New Zealand and Denmark, welfare benefits, hospitalisations, and criminal convictions are concentrated in a small number of individuals. We further showed a clustering of service use across sectors, so that individuals with high involvement in one sector are also more likely to have high involvement in another sector.

This paper will extend these findings to explore the trends and persistence of these accumulated disadvantage in New Zealand and Denmark. In particular we will answer the following questions:

1. Has the accumulation of disadvantages within individuals changed over time? That is, is there greater or lesser accumulation in younger vs. older cohorts?
2. To what extent does disadvantage persist in individuals as they age, and is there greater or lesser persistence in younger vs. older cohorts?
3. Is persistence more or less likely for some age cohorts than others?

We will use the following tables from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI):

• Life event data
• Person overseas spell
• Publicly funded hospital discharges
• Court charges data
• Benefit dynamics data
• Mortality data

Inequality in Service Uptake: A comparative study

Richmond-Rakerd L, D’Souza S, Andersen SH, Hogan S, Houts RM, Poulton R, Ramrakha S, Caspi A, Milne BJ, Moffitt TE (2020). Nature Human Behaviour 4(3): 255–264, doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0810-4.