The role of schools in transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: quasi-experimental evidence from Germany

Clara von Bismarck-Osten, Kirill Borusyak and Uta Schönberg

Economic Policy, 2022, vol. 37, issue 109, 87-130

Abstract: This paper considers the role of school closures in the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To isolate the impact of the closures from other containment measures and identify a causal effect, we exploit variation in the start and end dates of the summer and fall school holidays across the 16 federal states in Germany using a difference-in-differences design with staggered adoption. We show that neither the summer closures nor the closures in the fall had a significant containing effect on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 among children or a spill-over effect on older generations. There is also no evidence that the return to school at full capacity after the summer holidays increased infections among children or adults. Instead, we find that the number of children infected increased during the last weeks of the summer holiday and decreased in the first weeks after schools reopened, a pattern we attribute to travel returnees.

Keywords: COVID economics; school closures; public health; I10; I18; I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/epolic/eiac001 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of Schools in Transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Germany (2020)
Working Paper: The role of schools in transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: Quasi-experimental evidence from Germany (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:37:y:2022:i:109:p:87-130.

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Policy is currently edited by Ghazala Azmat, Roberto Galbiati, Isabelle Mejean and Moritz Schularick

More articles in Economic Policy from CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po Contact information at EDIRC., CES Contact information at EDIRC., MSH Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().