Abstract
Temporary school closures (TSC) represent a major challenge to policymakers across the globe due to their potential impact on instructional time and student achievement. A neglected but equally important question relates to how such closures affect the labor market behavior of parents. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of temporary school closures on parental labor market behavior, exploiting the prevalence of primary school teacher strikes across time and provinces in Argentina. We find clear evidence that temporary school closures negatively impact the labor market participation of mothers, in particular lower-skilled mothers less attached to the labor force and mothers in dual-income households who face a lower opportunity cost of dropping out of the labor force. This effect translates into a statistically significant and economically meaningful reduction in labor earnings: the average mother whose child is exposed to ten days of TSCs suffers a decline in monthly labor earnings equivalent to 2.92% of the mean. While we do not find any effects among fathers in general, fathers with lower predicted earnings than their spouses also experience negative labor market effects. This suggests that the parental response to TSCs depend, at least in part, on the relative income of each parent. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggest that the aggregate impact of TSCs on annual parental earnings is more than $113 million, and that the average mother would be willing to forego 1.6 months of labor earnings in order to ensure that there are no TSCs while her child is in primary school.
Highlights
Temporary school closures (TSC) represent a major challenge to policymakers across the globe due to their potential impact on instructional time and student achievement, and the prevalence of TSCs – with more than 10 million K-12 students affected in the US alone per year (Wong et al 2014) – has fueled a large interest among researchers in disentangling the effects of school disruptions on student outcomes (e.g. Mercotte and Hemelt 2008; Baker 2013; Hansen 2013; Goodman 2014; Jaume and Willén 2018).A neglected but important question relates to how temporary school closures affect the labor market behavior of parents
Each column in each panel comes from a separate estimation of equation (11), and the point estimates should be interpreted as the intentto-treat effect of TSCs on the labor market behavior of parents
In Panel B we show the sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of province-specific linear time trends; in Panel C we show results from estimating the more demanding dose-response triple difference specification that incorporates province-by-year fixed effects, year-by-dummy of having a child in primary school fixed effects, and province-by-dummy of having a child in primary school fixed effects; in predicted earnings than they do (Panel D) we report how the results change when including local labor market controls; and in Panel E we show the sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of the number of public administration strikes in the previous 12 months and its interaction with having a child in primary school
Summary
A neglected but important question relates to how temporary school closures affect the labor market behavior of parents. Programs and services such as universal preschool, public schooling and subsidized after-school activities allow caregivers to substitute childcare responsibilities for employment. In the event of a TSC, parents can no longer outsource childcare responsibilities to schools. TSCs may lead parents to reduce work hours or drop out of the labor force, with long-lasting adverse effects on wages and disposable income.. Since mothers tend to be the primary caregiver in the family – even in dual-career households – such effects could disproportionally hurt mothers and exacerbate existing labor market and intrahousehold gender inequalities (e.g. Gauthier, Smeeding and Furstenberg 2004; Guryan, Hurst and Kearney 2008; PRC 2015). TSCs may lead parents to reduce work hours or drop out of the labor force, with long-lasting adverse effects on wages and disposable income. Since mothers tend to be the primary caregiver in the family – even in dual-career households – such effects could disproportionally hurt mothers and exacerbate existing labor market and intrahousehold gender inequalities (e.g. Gauthier, Smeeding and Furstenberg 2004; Guryan, Hurst and Kearney 2008; PRC 2015).
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