been cast in terms of lost schooling attainment or lost learning or losses to earnings or gross domestic product.<sup>13</sup> This paper builds on these analyses by not only looking at the impact of school closures but also considering the channel of household income loss and its effects on school dropout. In addition, this paper examines not only what might happen to schooling and learning on average but also what might happen to the shape of the learning distribution. We express these estimated impacts in monetary terms, both as estimated individual losses and as total economic loss of future earnings at present value.

# _Efforts to mitigate school closures and their effectiveness_

Students around the world are having very disparate experiences as schools are closed. Education systems try to mitigate this by providing remote learning.<sup>14</sup> From Kenya<sup>15</sup> to the United Kingdom<sup>16</sup> to Australia<sup>17</sup> evidence is slowly emerging of a great deal of inequality both within and across countries in the supply of, access to, and effectiveness of mitigation strategies.<sup>18</sup> Rapid telephone surveys have been fielded in Ecuador to unpack not only the remote-learning experience, but also to shed light on student’s time use and mental health.<sup>19</sup> While mitigation strategies in the time of COVID-19 are often referred to as remote learning – it is important to note that in reality what many school systems rolled out was emergency response teaching.<sup>20</sup> This in turn was delivered via a variety of modalities – such as via paper-based homework sheets, radio, TV, mobile phones, text messages, and the internet, both instructordirected and self-paced.

The evidence on the effectiveness of remote learning in the past appears mixed at best. In the United States, studies find everything from unambiguously positive (US DoE, 2010 and Allen et al. 2004) to negative and null effects (Bernard et al, 2004). Kearney and Levine (2015) find evidence to suggest that exposure to Sesame Street when it was first introduced improved school readiness, particularly for boys and children living in economically disadvantaged areas but that the impact on ultimate educational attainment and labor market outcomes was inconclusive.

Different studies consistently find that digital technology is associated with moderate learning gains. One lesson learned from those studies is that technology should supplement teaching, rather than replace it. In particular, technologies are unlikely to bring changes in learning directly, but some have the potential to enable changes in teaching and learning interactions (Education Endowment Foundation, 2019). Effective use of digital technology is driven by learning and teaching goals rather than a specific technology. New technology does not automatically lead to increased attainment. An important finding is that educational production does not appear to fit a situation in which teachers and students can simply substitute between computer assistive learning and traditional learning at any level with the same result (Bettinger et al., 2020). Students’

> 13 Psacharapoulos et al. (2020).

> 14 In this paper mitigation refers to what governments are doing while schools are closed. Remediation refers to what governments might do once schools reopen.

> 15 Kihiu (2020).

> 16 Andrew et al. (2020).

> 17 Baker (2020).

> 18 Carvalho and Hares (2020).

> 19 Asanov et al. (2020).

> 20 Hodges et al. (2020).

5