learning recovery strategies at a national scale, and only half of the countries have national or regional plans to measure student learning and a quarter of low-income countries do not know how many students have returned to school (UNICEF, 2022).

In order to simulate the pandemic impacts on intergenerational educational mobility, our simulations map learning losses measured in LAYS into educational attainment, measured in years of education. Educational attainment refers to the level of education that an individual has completed. It typically refers to the highest degree or level of education that a person has achieved, such as a high school diploma, bachelor's degree, master's degree, or doctoral degree and is often seen as meaningful proxy for the human capital acquired by an individual. There are several ways to measure educational attainment. The most common method used is selfreport through household surveys. This method involves asking individuals to report their highest level of education completed. This method is quick and easy to administer and has been historically recognized that may be subject to errors if people misremember or misreport their educational achievements.

The pandemic has added another potential source of bias to this measure. Automatic re-enrollment and promotion were one of the earliest recommendations made by several international organizations and adopted by most countries (UNICEF, 2020; ECLAC-UNESCO, 2020). A number of development agencies continue to recommend that countries legally mandate a policy of re-enrolling all students regardless of the duration of their absence (UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, and OECD (2022). Such policy recommendations are likely to bias the expected years of schooling upward, at the same time as students experienced a reduction of their exposure to schooling and learning due to the COVID-related school closures. For instance, data from the latest Brazilian school census show a sharp increase in promotions, and a reduction in drop-outs and repetitions across all grades during the pandemic, which have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. Rigotti et al (2013) show that the policies of automatic promotion between multi-year cycles of Brazilian states, such as São Paulo, had a significant impact on the value of expected years of schooling when adjusted by age.

As consequence, the pandemic is likely to affect the comparability and subsequent interpretability of selfreported educational attainment through household surveys and expected years of schooling derived from administrative records, such as school census. As country-level data is starting to suggest, it is unlikely that these numbers should be interpreted in the same manner since the actual number of learning hours of these two cohorts is drastically different.

In the current simulations, we are not trying to predict educational attainment or explore the long-term relationship between these variables. We have used the LAYS framework to shock the expected years of schooling by the length of the school closure and further adjusted this value by the lower expected learning in Harmonized Test Scores (HTS) points. This exercise also accounts for the potential income effect on student enrollment, but this last mechanism seems to be of negligible magnitude compared to the other two.

# **Distributional-sensitive measures of national mitigation strategies**

In addition to the national estimates of learning losses due to COVID-19, in the distributionally-sensitive simulations undertaken in this paper, we also rely on information from High-Frequency Phone Surveys (HFPS) collected by the World Bank on the learning experience of children during the periods of school closures. In particular, for a sample of 30 countries, we have nationally-representative estimates on the following questions:

- (i) Were any children attending school before schools were closed due to coronavirus?

- (ii) Have the children been engaged in any education or learning activities in the last week?

- (iii) In what types of education or learning activities have the children been engaged in the last week?

- a. Completed assignments provided by the teacher

- b. Used mobile learning apps

- c. Watched educational TV programs

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