Abstract
To control the spread of COVID-19, the national government of Japan abruptly started the closure of elementary schools on March 2, 2020, but preschools were exempted from this nationwide school closure. Taking advantage of this natural experiment, we examined how the proactive closure of elementary schools affected various outcomes related to children and family well-being. To identify the causal effects of the school closure, we exploited the discontinuity in the probability of going to school at a certain threshold of age in months and conducted fuzzy regression discontinuity analyses. The data are from a large-scale online survey of mothers whose firstborn children were aged 4 to 10 years. The results revealed a large increase in children’s weight and in mothers’ anxiety over how to raise their children. On the outcomes related to marital relationships, such as the incidence of domestic violence and the quality of marriage, we did not find statistically significant changes. These findings together suggest that school closures could have large unintended detrimental effects on non-academic outcomes among children.
Highlights
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many countries closed schools in order to control infection
We explore how a marginal difference in the timing of children’s birth changed their experiences of school closure in March and eventually changed children’s and families’ outcomes, through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) with an age-based threshold (Lee and Lemieux, 2010; Canaan, 2020)
As a suggestive piece of evidence, we found a sharp increase in the number of Google searches for the word ‘‘divorce” on March 2—the first day of school closure—which is explained in Online Appendix A
Summary
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many countries closed schools in order to control infection. Utilizing the experience of school closure in Japan, this study successfully estimates the pure impacts of school closure on the well-being of families comprehensively, which is our study’s largest contribution This was made possible for the following two reasons: First, as we will see, Japan is the rare country that experienced school closure without any heavy restrictions on daily life activities, which makes it possible to separate the effects of school closure from the effects of other anti-COVID-19 policies such as lockdown. Due to this small difference in birth timing, these children and their families are likely to have similar characteristics and experiences of other anti-COVID-19 policies By comparing these two groups, we can identify the pure impact of school closure.
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