we make that effort and codify the 9,223 different answers to the 7 occupation variables in the HFPS. In particular, we map these answers to the 41 groups in the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08) at 2 digits.

Having a codified occupation variable is important for two reasons. The first one is apparent: it allows us to explore heterogeneities by occupation. Which were the occupations hardest hit by the pandemic? Did people move across occupations as a reaction to the shock? The increasingly influential task-based approach stresses the role of occupations in accounting for different labor behaviors and dynamics (Acemoglu and Autor 2011). Having harmonized occupation variables is also relevant for a second reason: it allows us to construct measures of potential for work from home, a crucial factor to cope with the shock generated by the pandemic and the containment measures. We compute a measure of work from home following the proposal of Dingel and Neiman (2020) based on occupational characteristics from O*NET. Given that in some occupations the possibility of teleworking depends on having internet access, which is far from universal in Latin America, we adjust our individual measures of WFH by taking into account home internet access reported in the HFPS (Garrote-Sanchez et al. 2021).

Our main analysis is based on fixed-effects models of job losses and other labor outcomes. We focus the analysis on the effect of two factors that may account for the severity of the shock: the individual’s potential for work from home (WFH) and some sociodemographic characteristics such as gender and number of children at home. We control for several factors and include fixed effects by occupation and by country. We also explore the role of the differences in the stringency of the social-distancing measures across countries and over time.

We first confirm two important results: (1) the impact of the COVID-19 shock was strongly decreasing in the possibility of working from home, and (2) women were more likely to lose their jobs than men. Importantly, we also find that the alleviating effect of WFH on the severity of the impact was especially relevant for women with children. In particular, the coefficient for the interaction between WFH and the dummy for woman is large and statistically significant in the sample of households with children but not among those without children. The result holds when we control for occupation fixed effects, implying that even among women in the same occupation, the ability for WFH was pivotal among those with children. This evidence is consistent with a plausible mechanism: given the traditional intrahousehold distribution of childcare responsibilities in Latin America, women with children were more likely to stay home due to school closures, and therefore the possibility of WFH became very relevant for them to keep their jobs.

Our results can be important to further understand the setbacks in terms of gender equality in the labor market generated by the pandemic and the containment measures, and the role of working from home in that process. Understanding these interactions can be important to speed up the return of women to the labor market. The longer it takes the re-entry, the more serious the consequences on women’s future working conditions.

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