Free compulsory education can mitigate COVID-19 disruptions’ adverse effects on child schooling

Abstract

Developing countries are increasingly under siege from various adverse income shocks, including climate hazards and public health crises, which are known to increase households’ opportunity cost of child schooling. This paper uses an individual fixed-effect linear probability model to test whether free compulsory education mitigates the permanent effect of COVID-19’s containment measures on children’s school attendance. In so doing, we exploit the variation across levels of education in the implementation of free compulsory education laws in Nigeria. Estimation results show that fifteen months after schools reopened, COVID-19’s containment measures had no permanent effect on the school attendance of children whose schooling was free and compulsory. However, they decreased the school attendance of those whose schooling was neither free nor compulsory by 7.8 percentage points. Our findings suggest that pre-existing education policies, such as the scale of implementation of compulsory education laws, influence children’s vulnerability to the negative effects of adverse aggregate income shocks on children’s schooling outcomes.