The Impact of U.S. School Closures on Labor Market Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

A substantial fraction of k-12 schools in the United States closed their in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures may have altered the labor supply decisions of parents of affected children due to a need to be at home with children during the school day. In this paper, we examine the impact of school closures on parental labor market outcomes. We test whether COVID-19 school closures have a disproportionate impact on parents of school-age children (ages 5-17 years old). Our results show that both women’s and men’s work lives were affected by school closures, with both groups seeing a reduction in work hours and the likelihood of working full-time but only women being less likely to work at all. We also find that closures had a corresponding negative effect on the earnings of parents of school-aged children. These effects are concentrated among parents without a college degree and parents working in occupations that do not lend themselves to telework, suggesting that such individuals had a more difficult time adjusting their work lives to school closures.