What the COVID-19 school closure left in its wake: Evidence from a regression discontinuity analysis in Japan
中文摘要
为控制新冠疫情的传播,日本中央政府于2020年3月2日突然启动小学停课,但幼儿园不在这一全国性停课范围之内。利用这一自然实验,我们考察了小学的主动停课如何影响与儿童及家庭福祉相关的各类结果。为识别学校停课的因果效应,我们利用了上学概率在以月计的年龄达到某一阈值处的不连续性,并进行了模糊断点回归分析。数据来自一项针对头胎子女年龄为4至10岁母亲的大规模在线调查。结果显示,儿童体重大幅增加,母亲对如何养育子女的焦虑也大幅上升。在与婚姻关系相关的结果上,例如家庭暴力的发生率和婚姻质量,我们未发现统计显著的变化。这些发现共同表明,学校停课可能对儿童的非学业结果产生巨大的非预期不利影响。
Abstract
To control the spread of COVID-19, the national government of Japan abruptly started the closure of elementary schools on March 2, 2020, but preschools were exempted from this nationwide school closure. Taking advantage of this natural experiment, we examined how the proactive closure of elementary schools affected various outcomes related to children and family well-being. To identify the causal effects of the school closure, we exploited the discontinuity in the probability of going to school at a certain threshold of age in months and conducted fuzzy regression discontinuity analyses. The data are from a large-scale online survey of mothers whose firstborn children were aged 4 to 10 years. The results revealed a large increase in children’s weight and in mothers’ anxiety over how to raise their children. On the outcomes related to marital relationships, such as the incidence of domestic violence and the quality of marriage, we did not find statistically significant changes. These findings together suggest that school closures could have large unintended detrimental effects on non-academic outcomes among children.