WBS secures €1.5m ERC grant to uncover how economic shocks damage people's health

The link between poverty and poor health is one of the best-established facts in social science.

Yet the mechanism that turns economic pressure into illness remains largely hidden.

Thanks to a unique set of data that tracks millions of people from birth to death and a €1.5 million European Research Council Starting Grant, Naomi Muggleton, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science, is seeking to open that black box.

Her five-year research project - ECHO (Economic Conditions and Health Outcomes) -  will follow people from financial shock through changes in spending, diet and behaviour to diagnosis, and in some cases, death.

Dr Muggleton said: "This funding lets us finally see the everyday decisions that turn financial pressure into poor health, the part everyone else has had to treat as a black box.

"Most research on poverty and health treats behaviours like how we spend, eat, or take risks as noise to strip out. ECHO treats this as the mechanism itself, the actual pathway connecting financial pressure to poor health."

Dr Muggleton is one of 421 early-career researchers across Europe – and just 47 in the UK – to have won funding totalling €705 million from the European Research Council (ERC), after it sifted through 4,807 proposals.

The Starting Grants, which are part of the Horizon Europe programme, are designed to support exceptional researchers at the beginning of their careers to develop ambitious ideas, build their own teams and establish their independence at a pivotal stage in their careers.

Maria Leptin, President of the ERC, said: “The creativity and ambition of this new generation of grantees are inspiring. More than 50 nationalities are represented among these researchers who will carry out their work across Europe. ERC Starting Grants will give them independence and support early on in their careers, needed for them to push scientific boundaries. This is the best investment we can make to further strengthen our research base and Europe’s future.”

Central to the ECHO project is an incredibly rich body of data assembled by Dr Muggleton. She has collected seven years of open-banking transaction data, allowing detailed analysis of how households adapt to changing financial circumstances.

Alongside this, Dr Muggleton has incorporated two decades of grocery purchasing data covering approximately 470,000 households, linked to nutritional information, prescriptions and medical diagnoses.

A third dataset combines probate and genealogical records covering all individuals who died in England and Wales between 1858 and 1995, amounting to some 66 million people.

By linking parents and children across generations, Dr Muggleton hopes to understand the long-term effects of wealth, deprivation and economic shocks on health and mortality.

Taken together, the datasets offer a level of longitudinal evidence that has rarely been available to researchers studying the relationship between economic conditions and health.

How financial pressure shapes health

Dr Muggleton added: “The ECHO project will examine four broad themes. First, it will investigate how financial strain alters household spending patterns and whether those changes predict future clinical risks.

“Second, it will explore how cost-of-living pressures influence diet, prescription use and medical diagnoses.

“Third, it will analyse how parental wealth affects children's behaviour and long-term survival prospects. Finally, it aims to identify the economic thresholds at which health risks begin to accelerate.”

The ability to observe economic exposure, behavioural adaptation and subsequent health outcomes within the same individuals could help Governments and policymakers better understand the hidden health costs of financial insecurity at a time when many households continue to face pressures from the cost-of-living crisis in many countries, such as the UK.

She added: "What makes this project different is that we can follow the same people from economic shock, through the behavioural changes they make in response, all the way to diagnosis and death. In some cases, we can examine those effects across generations.

“While economists and public health researchers have long established a link between poverty and poorer health, the mechanisms connecting the two remain poorly understood.

“ECHO seeks to address that gap and find out how the everyday choices people make under financial pressure can shape not only their quality of life, but ultimately how long they live.”

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