Primary school reopenings and parental work

Overview

Abstract (English)

In this paper, we exploit the geographical pattern of primary school reopenings dur-ing the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada to estimate the impact of school reopenings onparental employment and work hours. We use a triple-difference approach, in whichwe first compare parents of primary-school children in regions where schools reopenedto similar parents in regions where schools remained closed and add parents of older,secondary-school children as an additional control group. We estimate the impact ofschool reopenings separately for mothers and fathers, and for single parents and par-ents living in dual-parent households. We find a positive impact of school reopeningson employment and on actual hours worked. The effects tend to be stronger for singlemothers, but are also present for mothers and fathers in dual-parent households in thespring of 2020. Overall, single mothers experienced an 18 percentage point increase intheir employment at work rate following school reopenings. We also split our sampleaccording to whether the job can be done from home, and find stronger impacts forthose whose jobs cannot easily be done from home.

Abstract (French)

Please note that abstracts only appear in the language of the publication and might not have a translation.