Scars of Pandemics from Lost Schooling and Experience: Aggregate Implications and Gender Differences through the Lens of COVID-19

Abstract

Pandemic shocks disrupt human capital accumulation through schooling and work experience. This study quantifies the range of the long-term economic impact of these disruptions in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on countries at different levels of development and using returns to education and experience by college status that are globally estimated using 1,084 household surveys across 145 countries. We find that: (i) Both lost schooling and experience can contribute to significant losses in global learning and output; and (ii) Developed countries may incur greater losses than developing countries, because they have more schooling to start with and higher returns to experience. In addition, the returns to education and experience are separately estimated for men and women, to explore the differential effects by gender of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we uncover gender differences in returns to education and schooling, gender differences in the impact of COVID-19 are small and short-lived, with a loss in female relative income of only 2.5 percent or less mainly due to the greater severity of the employment shock on impact. The methodology employed in this study is easily implementable for future pandemics where global data availability is initially limited.