How did the COVID-19 crisis affect different types of workers in the developing world?

This paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the employment of different groups of workers across 40 mostly low and middle-income countries. Employment outcomes during the crisis are tracked through high-frequency phone surveys conducted by the World Bank and national statistics offices. Our results show that larger shares of female, young, less educated, and urban workers stopped working at the beginning of the pandemic.

The role of children and work-from-home in gender labor market asymmetries: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America.

Asymmetry in childcare responsibilities is one of the main reasons behind gender gaps in the labor market. In that context, the ability to work from home may alleviate the hindrances of women with children to participate in the labor market. We study these issues in Latin America, a region with wide gender gaps, in the framework of a major shock that severely affected employment: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Intra-household exposure to labor market risk in the time of Covid-19: lessons from Mexico.

The ability to work from home can be critical during pandemics. We calculate an index that measures the possibility of working from home based on the characteristics of the pre-Covid-19 pandemic distribution of occupations and on internet access at home, using microdata for Mexico. Focusing on households with two partners employed in nonessential occupations, we show that there is high within-household correlation in the possibility of working remotely, which is likely to be positively associated with job stability during the pandemic.