The impact of school closures during the Corona crisis

 This study quantifies the impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. The data suggests that secondary schools were closed for in-person learning for longer periods than elementary schools (implying that younger children experienced less school closures than older children), and that private schools experienced shorter closures than public schools, and schools in poorer U.S. counties experienced shorter school closures. 

Future earnings- and welfare losses are largest for children that started public secondary schools at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. Comparing children from the top- to children from the bottom quartile of the income distribution, welfare losses are ca. 0.8 percentage points larger for the poorer children if school closures were unrelated to income. Accounting for the longer school closures in richer counties reduces this gap by about 1/3. 

A policy intervention that extends schools by 3 months (6 weeks in the next two summers) generates significant welfare gains for the children and raises future tax approximately sufficient to pay for the cost of this schooling expansion.