income classes, and severity levels of the shock is very similar to the distribution of observations in the full sample (see Table B2), which suggests that the country-level data sets included in the analysis are not strongly biased due to missing values.

The data sets we analyze combined cover around 45,000 interviews from 49 low-, middle-, and highincome countries in the six regions where the World Bank Group (WBG) is present (see Table B1 in the appendix).<sup>6</sup> We follow Apedo-Amah et al. (2020) and exclude businesses in the sample that were permanently closed at the time of the interview and businesses operating in the education and health sectors, which results in a data set with almost 39,000 firms where the gender indicator is available.<sup>7</sup> These data include micro, small, medium, and large businesses across five broad sectors–i.e. hospitality, manufacturing, retail and wholesale, other services, and others.<sup>8</sup> Businesses in the sample are largely formal, though informal firms are included in Cambodia, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, and Tunisia. We focus on the short-term impact of the pandemic on women- vs men-led businesses and constrain our sample to interviews conducted between April and September 2020.

Even though the sampling frames for the BPS or the WBES follow-up are not nationally representative for men-led and women-led businesses, the harmonized data offer a comprehensive window into the differentiated impact of the pandemic on women entrepreneurs.<sup>9</sup> Consistent with many other studies, the fraction of women-led businesses in our data is the highest in East Asia and Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean (approximates 40%) and the lowest in the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia (only around 10%; see Table 1). In terms of firm traits, we find that the fraction of women-led businesses in our data is the highest in the hospitality industry (34%) and retail and wholesale (30%), and the lowest in agriculture, mining, construction, and utilities (17% on average)–thus confirming the stylized fact that women entrepreneurs are over-represented in the services sectors (e.g. Amin and Islam, 2014). Perhaps less intuitive is that our data show that the share of women-led businesses increases with firm size, from 25% among micro-firms to 29% among large firms, which is at odds with the often documented pattern that businesses led by women are smaller than those led by men (e.g. Islam et al., 2020). These shares, however, are unconditional means, which are likely strongly influenced by the unequal distribution of male and female-led firms across countries and regions. To correct for the composition of the sample, our main empirical analysis (in sections 5 to 7) always includes a basic set of country-level control variables.

> 6The survey covers East Asia and Pacific (EAP), Europe and Central Asia (ECA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Middle East and North-Africa (MNA), South Asia (SAR), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Among high-income countries, our data set includes Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. Table B1 in the appendix details the full list of economies. 7In general, businesses in the sampling frame that were not reached during data collection were replaced with businesses in the same strata. Permanently closed businesses in the data are businesses that were indeed contacted but during the interview reported that they had permanently shut down at the time of the interview. These businesses were not asked the questions on the variables that are the focus of our analysis, and we therefore drop them from our analysis. The fraction of these permanently closed firms that were contacted but not applied the full questionnaire does not differ between men- and women-led firms (the average for both is 2.5%). Hyland et al. (2020) also find similar rates of permanent closure for female and male-owned firms.

> 8The hospitality sector includes accommodation and food preparation services. Other services includes services other than the hospitality industry and retail and wholesale, such as transportation and storage services, information and communication services, and financial services. Others consists of agriculture and mining, and construction and utilities.

> 9Details on the sampling frames and the representativity of the BPS data are summarized in Table B3 in the appendix.

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