Essential Work and Emergency Childcare: Identifying Gender Differences in COVID-19 Effects on Labour Demand and Supply

Jordy Meekes, Wolter Hassink () and Guyonne Kalb
Additional contact information
Wolter Hassink: Utrecht University

No 13843, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We examine whether the COVID-19 crisis affects women and men differently in terms of employment, working hours and hourly wages outcomes, and whether the effects are demand or supply driven. COVID-19 impacts are studied using administrative data on all Dutch employees up to 30 June 2020, focussing on the national lockdown and the emergency childcare for essential workers in the Netherlands. First, we find that the impact of COVID-19 is much larger for non-essential workers than for essential workers. Although, on average, women and men are equally affected, female non-essential workers are more affected than male non-essential workers. Second, partnered individuals with young children are equally affected by the crisis as others, irrespective of gender and spousal employment. Third, single-parent essential workers experience relatively large negative labour supply effects, suggesting emergency childcare was not sufficient for this group. However, overall, labour demand effects appear more important than labour supply effects.

Keywords: essential workers; COVID-19; gender; employment; hours worked; lockdown (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J20 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published - published in: Oxford Economic Papers, 2023, 75 (2), 393 - 417

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13843.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Essential work and emergency childcare: identifying gender differences in COVID-19 effects on labour demand and supply (2023)
Working Paper: Essential work and emergency childcare: Identifying gender differences in COVID-19 effects on labour demand and supply (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:iza:izadps:dp13843

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().