A Synthetic Control Method Analysis of Schools Opening and Covid-19 Outbreak in Italy

Vincenzo Alfano, Salvatore Ercolano and Lorenzo Cicatiello

No 8784, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Schools have been very central in the debate about COVID-19. On one hand, there have been many supporters of the argument to keep them open, for their importance for the youngsters, and for the effort many countries played in establishing protocols to keep them safe. On the other hand, a counter-argument supported by several other stakeholders, has been that being a major occasion of aggregation between teenager and adults accompanying their children, and being a major occasion of congestion per the public transportation, keeping the schools open favours the spread of the virus. In this article, by the means of a quantitative analysis that exploits the quasi experimental setting offered by the scattered opening that schools have had in Italy, we aim to shed some light on the subject. More precisely, a synthetic control method approach suggests that Bolzano, the first province in Italy to have opened the schools after the summer break, has way more cases than its synthetic counterfactual, built from a donor pool constituted by the other Italian provinces. Results seem to confirm that that opening the schools causes and increase in the infections, and this has to be taken into account by the policymakers.

Keywords: Covid-19; synthetic control method; schools opening; Italy; coronavirus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 H75 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8784.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
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:ces:ceswps:_8784

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().