Shut Down Schools, Knock Down the Virus? No Causal Effect of School Closures on the Spread of COVID-19
AbstractAs COVID-19 spread in 2020, most countries shut down schools in the hopes of slowing the pandemic. Yet, studies have not reached a consensus about the effectiveness of these policies partly because they lack rigorous causal inference. Our study aims to estimate the causal effects of school closures on the number of confirmed cases. To do so, we apply matching methods to municipal-level dat
