The youth mental health crisis: Quasi-experimental evidence on the role of school closures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the youth mental health crisis has reached unprecedented levels. To which extent school closures, one of the most heavily debated pandemic measures, have contributed to or even caused this crisis is largely unknown. We seek to narrow this blind spot, by combining quasi-experimental variation in school closure and reopening strategies across the German federal states at the onset of the pandemic with nationwide, population-based survey data on youth mental health and high-frequency data from the largest crisis helpline. We show that prolonged school closures led to a substantial deterioration in youth health-related quality of life, precipitating early signs of mental health problems. The effects were most severe among boys, younger adolescents, and families with limited living space. We further provide evidence that family problems are a major issue that adolescents were struggling with when denied access to school. Overall, school closures largely explain the deterioration of youth mental health over the first pandemic wave.

Sports and Child Development.

The role of curricular activities for the formation of education, health and behavioural outcomes has been widely studied. Yet, the role of extra-curricular activities has received little attention. This study analyzes the effect of participation in sports clubs-one of the most popular extra-curricular activities among children. We use alternative datasets and flexible semi-parametric estimation methods with a specific way to use the panel dimension of the data to address selection into sports. We find positive and robust effects on children's school performance and peer relations. Crowding out of passive leisure activities can partially explain the effects.

When does time matter? maternal employment, children's time with parents, and child development.

This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children's time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children's time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better "quality" of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children's development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children's development. Stratification by mothers' education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother's education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and child care. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children's time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.

Maternal work conditions and child development.

How do maternal work conditions, such as psychological stress and physical hazards, affect children's development? Combining data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Occupational Information Network allows us to shed some light on this question. We employ various techniques including OLS with extensive controls, a value added approach and individual fixed effects in order to address potential endogeneity problems. Our results reveal that mothers' exposure to work-related hazards negatively affects children's cognitive development and to work-related stress negatively affects children's behavioral development. While maternal time investments play a small but significant role in mediating these negative associations, paternal time investments neither reinforce nor compensate these associations.