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.
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.