secondary education to stop working. Workers with tertiary education were on average 6.6 percentage points less likely to be out of work than those with less than high school education (Figure 7, Panel C and Appendix Table 3). Interestingly, differences between workers with tertiary education and those without decrease once we control for sector of employment: The relative advantage of tertiary educated workers to those with less than high school education declines to 3.7 percentage points (Appendix Table 3). Yet, the difference remains significant. suggesting that differences within sector associated with type of occupation, job formality/security, and the ability to work from home may be driving results. In addition, when looking at differences across quintiles, controlling for education, the coefficient on quintile 5 is reduced only slightly (from -0.131 to -0.126) and remains significant (Appendix Table 1, column 5).

A third hypothesis, though one that we are not able to test here, is that even within certain economic sectors, poorer workers are generally more likely to work in micro or small firms, which have been disproportionately affected to the pandemic (Freund and Pesme, 2021). Adopting digital technology such as digital platforms and digital solutions has been a common response among businesses to dealing with decreased sales during the pandemic. Findings from the Business Pulse Surveys suggest that digital adoption is associated with a smaller decline in sales. However, these surveys show that smaller businesses have been significantly less likely to adopt digital technology than larger ones (Freund and Pesme, 2021).

To note, in addition to differences in work stoppages across quintiles and by education levels, female workers were more likely to stop working once we control for education and sector of employment, according to pooled regression analyses (Appendix Table 2, 3). However, there is some variation across countries (Figure 8, Appendix Table 2). In places like Indonesia and the Philippines, women were less likely than men to return to work at times of economic reopening, even conditional on sector of employment (Figure 8).<sup>23</sup> In other places such as Mongolia, differences between men and women in the likelihood of stopping work were only marginally statistically significant initially, but women were significantly less likely than men to return to work, thus enlarging the gender gap in work stoppages across time. As lockdown measures led to school closures, increased caregiving activities largely fell on women, presenting barriers to employment. In addition, in some countries, women were more likely to work in sectors that were harder hit by the pandemic such as retail, manufacturing, and tourism. Thus, in the longer-term, it is possible that women may face greater difficulty recovering from the pandemic.

> 23 Uneven recovery from work stoppages may be just one part of the gender story: Analysis based on the Indonesia Labor Force Surveys, however, shows that six months into the pandemic, women in Indonesia were more likely to join the labor force for the first time, largely in unskilled, informal, and agricultural employment (Halim et al., 2021).

18