in employment and income, access to health and education services, and coping mechanisms to deal with job loss or other shocks related to the pandemic or the measures implemented by governments to mitigate the spread of the disease. The questionnaires also inquired about household knowledge about the disease and the degree of compliance with preventive measures.<sup>3</sup> In each selected household, only one adult aged 18 and above was interviewed. The same respondent was contacted again in the following rounds. Around 1,000 surveys per country were gathered in the first round, 73 percent in the second, and 70 percent in the third.<sup>4</sup> Survey estimates for each country are representative of individuals aged 18 and above who have an active cellphone number or a landline at home.<sup>5</sup> Also, the survey is representative of households with a landline and for which at least one member has a cellphone. Tables 1 and 2 present summary statistics of the main variables in the HFPS for the 13 Latin American countries taken together. According to Mejia-Mantilla et al. (2021), compared to national household surveys, individuals in the HFPS sample are somewhat more educated, younger and more likely to reside in urban areas.

The HFPS were extremely useful in the midst of the crisis, when data from national household surveys (NHS) was not available. But, even when these larger surveys became available, the relevance of the HFPS remained high for various reasons. First, the questionnaire of the World Bank surveys was especially tailored to the crisis and includes a large number of specific questions. Second, unlike most NHS, the HFPS are multi-wave panel surveys that allow tracking short-run changes during the pandemic. Finally, the HFPS were uniform across countries (same questionnaire, same time window, etc.), so the comparability of the results and the possibility to construct aggregate regional measures are enhanced compared to the much more heterogeneous national household surveys.

# **3.2 Occupations**

The HFPS dataset includes seven questions on the occupation of a worker: one for the pre-pandemic situation and two in each of its three rounds, one for people who worked the previous week and another for those who did not work but who still have a job. These questions on occupation capture important information on the activities performed by workers, and hence are very useful for the analysis of the labor market, as stressed by the task-based approach (Acemoglu and Autor 2011). Although the HFPS have been used as the main input for several recent papers on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, to the best of our knowledge, the occupation variables were not considered in those studies. The most likely reason for this neglect is that, in contrast to the rest of the variables in

> 3The COVID-19 monitoring global dashboard provides harmonized indicators across countries in Latin America and the world. For more information on the HFPS, see Mejía-Mantilla et al. (2021).

> 4The sample weights take into account the attrition in the second and third rounds. The weights were calibrated to incorporate population projections of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). See Mejia-Mantilla et al. (2021).

> 5The sample is based on a dual frame of cellphone and landline numbers generated through a Random Digit Dialing (RDD) process. For a detailed description of sampling and weighting see Flores Cruz (2020).

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