Full Citation

Title: School closures, parental labor supply, and time use

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: The closure of schools to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic posed a unique shock to parents. This paper reexamines the effect of schooling mode on parental labor supply. The effects are undetectable using a full suite of controls for unobserved heterogeneity, which can be motivated by the failure of more parsimonious models to pass simple placebo tests. Even abstracting from such controls, though, a shift from fully virtual to in-person implies an increase in hours worked of 2 to 2.5 hours per week. We present a simple model of parental time allocation and child development to formalize why these estimates appear unexpectedly small. We then introduce telework and nonparental care into the theory, demonstrate that these features can support realistic labor supply outcomes, and illustrate how our estimates in turn discipline the inference of salient structural parameters. Evidence from time use diaries indicates that telework did support both market work and childcare, chiefly among parents with college degrees. Time use data and other surveys also provide suggestive evidence of the increased utilization of nonparental care.

Url: https://enghinatalay.github.io/schools.pdf

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Authors: Atalay, Enghin; Kobler, Ryan; Michaels, Ryan

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Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS, IPUMS CPS, IPUMS Time Use - ATUS

Topics: Education, Health, Work, Family, and Time

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