in allowing adults to adjust working hours after a change in the childcare burden; participation in household agriculture was also less affected by the pandemic.

Agricultural households drive average labor impacts. Poorer households—based on an index of housing and assets—increase work hours by more than wealthy ones but not significantly so. They are more likely to be engaged in agriculture and may have had fewer resources to deal with increased childcare needs during closures. We observe no differences in impacts between rural and urban locations. Relatively high participation in agriculture even in ‘urban’ areas and low participation in wage employment or take-up of paid childcare in our sample mean that key differences that could affect how changes in childcare burdens affect labor supply by location are not present in this context.

Surprisingly, the impacts are not significantly different by sex, contrasting with evidence of more negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers’ labor hours in high-income contexts (Alon et al. 2021; Amuedo-Dorantes et al. 2020; Collins et al. 2021; Hansen, Sabia, and Schaller 2022; Heggeness 2020) and expectations based on women’s role as primary caregivers in most Kenyan households. One reason for the lack of difference is that in our sample, both women and men contribute to childcare and increased childcare hours during school closures. A second reason is that in this setting, school-age children are both _recipients_ of childcare and _contributors_ to household productive activities, including childcare to siblings and household agriculture. We find that women’s labor supply responds relatively more to changes in childcare burdens while men respond more to changes in child agricultural labor, leading to offsetting impacts.

The effects of the partial school reopening on adult childcare and work hours vary with household composition—in particular, the presence of below-school-age children—consistent with evidence of economies of scale in childcare and of an important role of siblings in childcare (Jakiela et al. 2020). Whether the returning student is a net provider or recipient of childcare in the household determines whether the reopening is a negative or positive childcare shock. Increases in work hours are driven by households without below-school-age children, where the student’s return to school decreases adults’—and particularly women’s—childcare burdens. A second mechanism for the impacts we observe is participation of school-age-children in household agriculture. Child agriculture hours decrease in treated households by approximately one-quarter of the total increase in adult agriculture hours, suggesting some of this increase substituted for child labor during Kenya’s main harvest season.

This paper explores a new dimension of the relationship between childcare and labor supply (e.g., Browning 1992; Connelly 1992; Ribar 1992) by considering how formal childcare for schoolage children (through schooling) affects households through changes in both childcare burdens and availability of child labor. The current literature largely studies childcare for below-school-age children and treats children solely as childcare recipients, while focusing on settings dominated by wage employment. These characteristics do not generalize to many LMIC contexts. Among studies of childcare and labor supply in African LMICs (Bjorvatn et al. 2021; Clark et al. 2019; Delecourt and Fitzpatrick 2021; Heath 2017; Lokshin, Glinskaya, and Garcia 2000; Martinez, Naudeau, and 3