ArticleEuropean economic review2022
Schools opening and Covid-19 diffusion: Evidence from geolocalized microdata.
Article in European economic review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Age-specific COVID-19 case dynamics during school closure periods: Evidence from 12 european countries.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2026Article
- Patterns of Distress and Supportive Resource Use by Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Teachers' demographics, mindfulness skills, and anxiety predict COVID-19 vaccination status.BMC public health · 2025Article
- School life during COVID-19: a qualitative study exploring English secondary school staff and pupils' experiences of the school-based mitigation measures.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 epidemics in pediatric population in Liguria (North-west Italy) from March 2020 to December 2022: what could we have learned?Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene · 2024Article
- Automated local lockdowns for SARS-CoV-2 epidemic control-assessment of effect by controlled interrupted time series analysis.IJID regions · 2024Article
- Will the last be the first? School closures and educational outcomes.European economic review · 2023Article
- Community-based COVID-19 outbreak of the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) variant of concern in Newfoundland, February to March 2021.Canada communicable disease report = Releve des maladies transmissibles au Canada · 2023Article
- Back to school or … back to lockdown? The effects of opening schools on the diffusion of COVID-19 in Italian regions.Socio-economic planning sciences · 2022Review
- Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls.Journal of economic behavior & organization · 2022Article
- Schools under mandatory testing can mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- News shocks at the local level: Evidence from a conditional Covid-19 containment measure.Economics letters · 2022Article
- Association of COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality Rates With School Reopening in Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic.JAMA health forum · 2022Observational
- No causal effect of school closures in Japan on the spread of COVID-19 in spring 2020.Nature medicine · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Are schools triggering the diffusion of the Covid-19? This question is at the core of an extensive debate about the social and long-run costs of stopping the economic activity and human capital accumulation from reducing the contagion. In principle, many confounding factors, such as climate, health system treatment, and other forms of restrictions, may impede disentangling the link between schooling and Covid-19 cases when focusing on a country or regional-level data. This work sheds light on the potential impact of school opening on the upsurge of contagion by combining a weekly panel of geocoded Covid-19 cases in Sicilian census areas with a unique set of school data. The identification of the effect takes advantage of both a spatial and time-variation in school opening, stemming from the flexibility in opening dates determined by a Regional Decree, and by the occurrence of a national referendum, which pulled a set of poll-station schools towards opening earlier or later September 24th. The analysis finds that census areas where schools opened earlier observed a significant and positive increase in the growth rate of Covid-19 cases between 2.5-3.7%. This result is consistent across several specifications, including accounting for several determinants of school opening, such as the number of temporary teachers, Covid-19 cases in August, and pupils with special needs. Finally, the analysis finds lower effects in more densely populated areas, on younger population, and on smaller class size. The results imply that school reopening generated an increase of one third in cases.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.