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The effect of teacher strikes on parents

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102679Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Teacher strikes lead mothers to drop out of the labor force.

  • This translates into a large reduction in earnings.

  • The effects amount to an aggregate loss of $92 million dollars each year.

  • Concerning men, only those who earn less than their wives are negatively affected.

  • Access to alternative childcare options mute some of the effects of strikes.

Abstract

Teacher industrial action is a leading cause of temporary school closures around the globe. These events leave millions of families struggling with disrupted childcare arrangements and may have important consequences for the labor market outcomes of parents. This paper presents the first detailed analysis on the topic, exploiting recently digitalized data on teacher strikes in Argentina in a dose-response triple difference framework. Mothers respond to teacher strikes by dropping out of the labor force and this translates into a large reduction in earnings: 10 days of strike-induced school closures during the previous year reduces monthly labor earnings by almost 3 percent relative to the mean. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this amounts to an aggregate loss of more than $92 million dollars in Argentina each year. With respect to men, only fathers with lower predicted earnings than their spouses experience adverse labor market effects. Access to alternative care options mute some of the effects of strike-induced school disruptions on parental labor market outcomes.

Introduction

Teacher industrial action is a leading cause of temporary school closures around the globe, and over the past few years numerous countries - from Tunisia in North Africa to India in South Asia - have documented large and persistent numbers of teacher strikes.1 These temporary school closures leave millions of families struggling with disrupted childcare arrangements and may have important consequences for the labor market outcomes of parents. This is especially the case for more vulnerable and disadvantaged individuals, such as low-income mums, who may find it particularly difficult to secure alternative childcare options. Unfortunately, a lack of exogenous variation in teacher strikes linked to parental labor market data has precluded a detailed analysis on this topic. As a consequence, we lack a complete understanding of how families are affected by the childcare crises that emerge from school closures, hindering the design of effective policy responses.

In this paper, we exploit recently digitalized data on teacher strikes in Argentina to present the first comprehensive analysis on the effect of teacher strikes on parental labor market outcomes. Between 2003 and 2014, Argentina experienced 649 teacher strikes of different lengths. These strikes translate into a loss of 94 instructional days for the average province, equivalent to more than half a year of schooling. As can be seen in Table 1, both the across- and within-province variation over time is substantial, ranging from 0 days in Ciudad de Buenos Aires in 2005 to 78 days in Chubut in 2013. This makes Argentina an ideal setting for studying our research question of interest: How do teacher strikes impact the labor market outcomes of parents?

Identifying the effect of teacher strikes on parents is difficult due to the potential existence of contemporaneous shocks or policies. Specifically, strikes may be correlated with other events that also affect the labor market outcomes of parents. To overcome this challenge and isolate the effect of strikes on parents, we utilize a dose-response triple difference design. We exploit teacher strikes that are primarily concentrated to the primary school level, and compare the difference in outcomes between parents with and without children in primary school in provinces and years that experienced more strike days to that same difference in provinces and years that experienced fewer strike days. This design enables us to control for potential confounders and isolate the effect of strikes on parents.

Using the empirical framework described above, we relate strikes in the previous year to current labor market outcomes.2 We find robust evidence that teacher strikes negatively impact the labor market participation of mothers, and that this translates into a significant reduction in earnings. Specifically, a mother whose child is exposed to ten days of teacher strikes in the previous year is 2.7 percent less likely to be employed, and suffers a decline in total earnings equivalent to 2.4 percent, relative to the respective means. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this negative effect on labor earnings amounts to an aggregate loss of more than $92 million in Argentina each year. Through auxiliary analyses we show that the impact of teacher strikes on maternal labor market behavior fades the further back in time they occurred, and that the maternal labor outcomes have been restored two year after the strikes have taken place. The one exception to this concerns wages, which shows evidence of more persistent effects. The transitory nature of the effects is important to highlight when considering the policy implications of the results.

In contrast to its impact on mothers, teacher strikes have no effect on the labor market outcomes of fathers in general. However, they do negatively impact the labor supply of fathers with lower predicted earnings than their wives. This suggests that the labor supply response of parents depend, at least in part, on the relative income of each parent (Blundell et al. 2005; Apps and Rees 2012; Cherchye et al. 2012). Yet, the number of households in which the mother earns more than the father is small, and the estimated effect for this subgroup of fathers is significantly smaller than the estimated effect for mothers. Consequently, teacher strikes increase labor market and intra-household gender inequality. Given the prevalence of teacher strikes across the globe, this may represent an undocumented obstacle to gender equality.

After having revealed the average impact of teacher strikes on parents, we show that the availability of alternative childcare options may reduce some of these adverse effects. Specifically, we demonstrate that parents who lives with other non-working adults are less likely to exit the labor force; that parents who work in the public sector (where contracts are more likely to include provisions that allow parents to take a temporary leave of absence to provide homecare) are less affected by the strikes; and that certain parents respond to the strikes by transferring their children to private school (where they are isolated from public sector teacher strikes). These results reveal that the existence of alternative childcare options may lessen the adverse effects of teacher strikes on parental labor market outcomes. However, we also show that this likely comes at the cost of increased socioeconomic school segregation, as teacher strikes only induce children from certain backgrounds to migrate from public to private school.

The main identifying assumptions underlying our estimation strategy are common to all dose-response triple difference specifications: there can be no province-specific shocks that occur concurrently with the strikes that differentially impact parents with and without children in primary school, and the timing of the strikes must be uncorrelated with trends in the difference in labor market outcomes between parents with and without children in primary school.

We provide extensive evidence that our data are consistent with these assumptions. In particular, our results are robust to controlling for local labor market conditions, controlling for province-specific strikes in professions outside the teaching sector, including province-specific linear time trends, including province-by-year fixed effects, and excluding parents with high exposures to teacher strikes. This means that province-specific secular trends or shocks that can bias our results must occur concurrently with the teacher strikes and differentially impact parents with children in primary school and parents without children in primary school, and be uncorrelated with factors such as non-teacher strikes and local labor market conditions.3

In addition, we perform two placebo tests. First, we reassign treatment from t-1 to t+1 and show that there are no effects of future strikes on current outcomes. Thus, parents do not systematically anticipate and respond to future strikes (something which would attenuate our results). Second, we estimate dose-response difference-in-difference models separately for our treatment and control groups (exploiting only variation across provinces in a given year and within provinces over time). This exercise demonstrates that the effects identified in our main analysis are driven exclusively by changes in outcomes among individuals in the treatment group. Taken together, the results from the robustness and placebo tests are inconsistent with a violation of the identifying assumptions, and support a causal interpretation of our results.4

This paper complements the existing literature in several ways. First, there is a rich literature examining the relationship between teacher strikes and student outcomes. While the results from earlier research are mixed (e.g. Zwerling 2008; Thornicroft 1994; Zirkel 1992; Caldwell and Jeffreys, 1983; Caldwell and Moskalski, 1981), more recent studies have found consistent negative effects on student achievement (e.g. Baker 2013; Johnson 2011; Belot and Webbink 2010) and long-term labor market outcomes (Jaume and Willén 2019). Our paper complements this strand of research by providing the first comprehensive analysis on the impact of strikes on parents, and helps provide a more comprehensive understanding of the overall effects of teacher strikes on families.5 Our results show that the cost of teacher industrial action is significantly larger than previously thought, as prior estimates have abstracted away from the effect on parents.

Second, there is a large literature that studies how changes in childcare costs affect parental labor supply (e.g. Heckman 1974; Blau and Robins 1988; Connelly 1992; Ribar 1992; Ermisch 1993; Kimmel 1998; Anderson and Levine 1999), and a related literature exploring how the availability of various childcare options interact with parental labor market behavior (e.g. Gelbach 2002; Chiuri 2003; Lefebvre and Merrigan 2008; Berlinski et al. 2009; Cascio 2009; Goux and Maurin 2010; Havnes and Mogstad 2011; Fitzpatrick et al. 2011; Fitzpatrick 2012; Nollenberger and Rodrígez-Planas, 2015). None of these papers examine the effect of abrupt and temporary changes in childcare costs/options. Further, these papers focus exclusively on the effects of expanded childcare services and reduced childcare costs (i.e. positive childcare shocks). Our paper complements these strands of literature and helps provide a more complete understanding of the relationship between childcare and parental labor supply.6

In terms of policy implications, our results highlight that teacher strikes have a substantial impact on the labor market outcomes of parents. Conventional solution to teacher strikes – the provision of make-up days at the end of the semester –therefore needs to be revised or supplemented as it deals only with the impact of strikes on student learning. One solution could be to hire non-teacher substitutes that staff the schools during teacher strikes, such that schools do not close during teacher walkouts. While costly, this was a solution favored by the Los Angeles school district during the 2019 district-wide teacher strike. As the frequency of teacher industrial action is increasing across the globe, this expanded understanding of the implications of teacher industrial action is imperative for designing policies that minimize fallout arising from labor conflicts in the education sector.

Section snippets

Economic intuition

Programs and services such as universal preschool and primary schooling allow caregivers to substitute childcare responsibilities for employment. In the event of a teacher strike, parents can no longer outsource childcare responsibilities to schools. These events thus lead to an increase in the cost of childcare, to which parents can respond in a number of different ways: (1) take a temporary leave of absence to provide short-term home care,7

Data

Data on teacher strikes come from Consejo Técnico de Inversiones (CTI). CTI collects information on teacher strikes both at the primary and secondary level by scraping local and national newspapers in Argentina. CTI also collects information on strikes in other economic sectors. The end result is a yearly report on labor conflicts in Argentina with monthly information on days of strikes by province and by economic sector (education, health, public administration, truck drivers, etc.). Any

Main results

Table 3 presents baseline estimates of the effect of strike-induced school disruptions on the labor market behavior of mothers (Panel A) and fathers (Panel B). The estimates show changes in labor market outcomes from 10 days of TSCs for the respective group. Each column in each panel comes from a separate estimation of equation (1). Section 5 discusses results obtained from our alternative specifications.

Columns 1 and 2 of Table 3 present results for earnings and wages. Focusing on mothers,

Robustness and sensitivity checks

In this section, we study the sensitivity of our results to changes in sample composition and model specification. Due to the lack of statistically significant and economically meaningful effects among fathers in our main specifications, we only discuss the results for mothers in this section, all of which are shown in Table 9.28

Household level analysis

In this section, we perform two auxiliary household-level analyses to better understand the total impact of TSCs. First, we study if the individual-level effects identified in Section 4 translate into overall effects on the parents. The idea behind this analysis is to understand if the negative employment and earnings effects from our individual-level analysis translate into negative earnings effect for the parents, or if there is a substitution effect between spouses such that the net effect

Discussion and conclusion

Teacher industrial action is a leading cause of temporary school closures around the globe, and over the past few years several countries have documented unprecedented numbers of teacher strikes. These events disturb conventional childcare arrangements and may have detrimental effects on parental labor market outcomes. Yet, despite the prevalence of teacher strikes, and the debates surrounding them, we know very little about their impact on parents. As a consequence, we lack a complete

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    This project was partially funded by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence Scheme, FAIR project no. 262675. The authors gratefully acknowledge comments from Maria Lombardi, Mariana Marchionni, Jorge Perez, Jonah Rockoff, and Evan Riehl, as well as from seminar participants at the University of Texas at Austin, Stockholm School of Economics, Bank of Mexico, University of Bergen, Aarhus University, Statistics Norway, the 2018 APPAM Conference, the 2019 AEFP Conference, the 2019 SOLE Conference, the 2019 LACEA Conference, and the 2019 WINE Conference. A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title “Oh Mother: The Neglected Impact of School Disruptions”. The views expressed herein are those of the authors; they do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution with which they are affiliated.

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