**Similar results hold when using the head definition.** When restricting the sample to household heads, a slightly higher share of heads who are self-employed (20 - 21 percent) receive assistance compared to those who are wage earners (18 percent). All other kinds of assistance are nearly equally received by self-employed/family enterprises as compared to wage earners, with the latter being 1-2 percentage points more likely to sell assets, receive government assistance, or receive cash or in-kind support from a private contributor (Table 5). Asset sales are low, though 9 percent of wage-earning household heads and 8 percent of household heads owning an agricultural enterprise sold assets. In contrast, 6 percent of non-agricultural self-employed sold assets.

**The summary statistics suggest that households owning an enterprise, especially a non-farm enterprise, are more likely than non-enterprise owning households to experience income loss, and they depend more on external support to cope with shocks than households without enterprises.** These results are robust to the definition used to identify household enterprise. That said, the sample size does not allow us to test if the averages differ across groups. As the literature suggests, though, some sub-groups of household enterprise owners may be particularly susceptible to income losses or to using particular coping strategies. We further explore these correlations using regression analysis below.

# **4. Early Impacts of the Pandemic on Income and Use of Coping Strategies**

**In line with the analysis presented in section 3, in the first wave of the pandemic, households with enterprises, particularly non-farm enterprises, were more likely to report total income declines as compared to those without enterprises.** Table 6 shows the correlates of income declines from linear probability models when pooling data from the three countries with complete data: Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria. The estimates suggest that, controlling for household welfare, owning a non-farm business increases the likelihood of total income decline by 26 percentage points in comparison to households not owning a business of any kind.<sup>32</sup> The correlations were not statistically significant for households with farm businesses.

**The same trends emerge when using the household head definition of urban household enterprise.** Controlling for poverty and demographic characteristics, self-employed heads of nonagricultural enterprises are about 20 percentage points more likely on average to have reported declines in total income than wage workers (Table 6). This reiterates the importance of separately analyzing urban agricultural and non-agricultural household enterprises.

**Adult heads were disproportionately likely to report income losses while gender differences were small.** Controlling for poverty, the results show that adult-led households are 30 percentage points more likely to experience a decline of household revenue than are heads of younger households (Table 6). This may reflect the larger size of older households that may have more people of working-age and a more diversified household labor portfolio, so the joint probability of an income loss may be greater than in smaller households. The gender coefficient is small and not statistically significant, signaling that female-led households fared similarly to those headed by males, with an average of 60 percent of households losing income, given the controls. While

> 32 The results are similar when controlling for industrial sector (manufacturing, services, agriculture, and other).

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