COVID-19 within families amplifies the prosociality gap between adolescents of high and low socioeconomic status

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Noncognitive skills are important for lifetime outcomes. Here, we study how COVID-19 infections affect the prosociality—one key noncognitive skill with important relations to labor market outcomes—of French high school students. We put a major focus on the question whether COVID-19 has a differential effect on students from low or high socioeconomic status (SES). While it is known by now that COVID-19 has had more negative health and economic effects on people with low SES, the effects on noncognitive skills have not been studied so far. We find that COVID-19 within families amplifies the gap in prosociality between adolescents of high and low SES.

Abstract

COVID-19 has had worse health, education, and labor market effects on groups with low socioeconomic status (SES) than on those with high SES. Little is known, however, about whether COVID-19 has also had differential effects on noncognitive skills that are important for life outcomes. Using panel data from before and during the pandemic, we show that COVID-19 affects one key noncognitive skill, that is, prosociality. While prosociality is already lower for low-SES students prior to the pandemic, we show that COVID-19 infections within families amplify the prosociality gap between French high school students of high and low SES by almost tripling its size in comparison to pre–COVID-19 levels.

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Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France

Henrik Salje, Cécile Tran Kiem, Noemie Lefrancq … (2020)

France has been heavily affected by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17 March 2020. Using models applied to hospital and death data, we estimate the impact of the lockdown and current population immunity. We find 3.6% of infected individuals are hospitalized and 0.7% die, ranging from 0.001% in those 80ya. Across all ages, men are more likely to be hospitalized, enter intensive care, and die than women. The lockdown reduced the reproductive number from 2.90 to 0.67 (77% reduction). By 11 May 2020, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 2.8 million (range: 1.8–4.7) people, or 4.4% (range: 2.8–7.2) of the population, will have been infected. Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.

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Economic and social consequences of human mobility restrictions under COVID-19

Giovanni Bonaccorsi, Francesco Pierri, Matteo Cinelli … (2020)

Significance This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the impact of lockdown measures introduced in response to the spread of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on socioeconomic conditions of Italian citizens. We leverage a massive near–real-time dataset of human mobility and we model mobility restrictions as an exogenous shock to the economy, similar to a natural disaster. We find that lockdown measures have a twofold effect: First, their impact on mobility is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity; second, they induce a segregation effect: mobility contraction is stronger in municipalities where inequality is higher and income per capita is lower. We highlight the necessity of fiscal measures that account for these effects, targeting poverty and inequality mitigation.