This paper studies the labor supply responses of parents to anticipated school closures due to school holidays and unanticipated school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland. Using the variation in the timing of school holidays by region, we find that while both fathers and mothers reduce hours worked in response to school holiday closures, fathers reduce theirs much more than mothers. To identify the effects of pandemic school closures, we focus on marginal workers – those in occupations that were resilient to the pandemic labor demand shocks but had limited ability to work remotely and therefore, faced the greatest challenge in meeting increased child care needs.
We find that the unanticipated pandemic school closures reduced the hours worked of parents somewhat less than for workers without children. We find almost no negative effects on mothers, while for fathers, we find that their labor supply was affected less than that of men without children. In our heterogeneity analyses, we discover that fathers of older children and/or with greater ability to work remotely were the least affected by these school closures. This suggests that parents were able to successfully accommodate the increased child care needs due to lack of in-person schooling without any negative impact on their labor supply.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.