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Papers in the special issue were presented at five conferences in the After the Pandemic Conference Series, organized by the International Centre for Economic Analysis (ICEA), for which the Review is the official journal, and held online between October 29, 2021 and December 10, 2021. The list of the conferences in the series is at the end of the introduction.

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School closures during the covid-19 pandemic disrupted learning among students globally, with concerns for long-term impacts on adolescent well-being and likely differential effects for boys versus girls. This study explores the gendered impacts of covid-19-related school closures on continued learning and motivation among secondary-school students in Bangladesh and presents short-term impacts of a cluster randomized intervention that offered students an innovative, virtually-delivered Growth Mindset curriculum. During the covid-19 pandemic, our analysis highlights that boys were significantly more likely to engage with media for continued learning, whereas girls were more likely to use books and paper assignments. Motivation for learning and aspirations for higher education fell during the covid-19 pandemic, particularly for girls. The randomized Growth Mindset intervention, which promoted the idea that individual characteristics, such as intelligence can be developed through practice, results in significant increases in adolescent motivation and aspirations across both genders. For boys, the effect sizes are large enough to compensate for negative covid-19 pandemic impacts; however, due to the larger negative impacts of the pandemic for girls, a covid-19 pandemic-related gender gap persists. Our findings suggest that a virtually-delivered Growth Mindset intervention mitigates the negative impacts of extended school closures, but that additional policies are needed to address gender differences in adolescent outcomes.

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This study examines the gender impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market and household wellbeing, using an online survey of the users of Pakistan’s largest online job platform. The analysis shows that the pandemic led to an unprecedented level of economic insecurity for employees and employers alike, resulting in widespread job loss, business closures, a slowdown in business activity, and reduced working hours. The sectors where female workers are heavily concentrated, such as education, were more severely affected. The pandemic has also led to a disproportionate increase in women’s unpaid care work and increased their reported rates of stress and anxiety. These findings suggest that the pandemic had significant wellbeing impacts on women in Pakistan, including a decline in the female labor force participation rate, which is already among the world’s lowest.

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Though gender equality has been at the centre of debate over the last decades, a number of benefits concerning the impact of female directors on corporate performance are still overlooked. Particularly, the link that seems to exist between female directors and sustainable finance has received limited attention. We investigate the impact of an enhancement in female presence, meant as women in decision-making positions, on a firm’s performance both in financial and sustainability terms. The goal is to contribute to the literature streams on gender economics and on sustainable finance.

Most research on sustainable finance and its impact on corporate governance rely only on aggregate ESG ratings for their results. Such scores are typically a black-box, with financial providers supplying little information about their methodology. Our analysis not only develops disaggregate scores for each dimension, but also provides motivation for the measurement of gender equality by means of specific indicators, such as the number of female directors, going beyond the bare (S) or (G) rating. ESG ratings and specific indicators of gender equality were retrieved from the well-known Bloomberg provider. Relying on a dataset concerning European companies, we empirically show that an increase in gender equality has a positive effect on a firm’s financial performance and on its share of sustainable investments.

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Using an online survey among Filipinos jointly conducted by YouGov and the Institute of Global Health Innovation at the Imperial College London from 31 March to 30 September 2020, this paper examines the state of mental health in the Philippines during the height of the pandemic and its link to public trust in and confidence toward the government and relevant authorities. The analysis reveals that young adults, women, part-time employees, unemployed, and persons with comorbidities have faced elevated risks of psychological distress during the pandemic. Empirical results further indicate that having strong and capable governance, setting clear directions and guidelines, and effectively motivating compliant behaviors on safety protocols allay fears and concerns among these groups, and thus are instrumental to preventing potential cases of depressive and anxiety disorders.

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We investigate whether rising income disparity contributes to the proliferation of shadow economic activities in Nigeria. The study uses data from 1991 to 2018 and adopts the Auto-regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) cointegration approach to study the effects of income inequality on the shadow economy in both the short- and the long-run. Our results show that the Nigerian shadow economy responds positively to increases in income inequality, especially in the short run. We also find that the large income disparity in Nigeria drives the poor into informal economic activity, primarily for survival, and that unemployment partly contributes to informality. Our findings suggest that unemployment may be both a result and a cause of rising income disparity in Nigeria, leading to an expansion of the shadow economy. These findings indicate that regulating the proliferation of shadow economic activities in Nigeria will necessitate, among other things, the implementation of measures to reduce income gaps, such as stronger institutional frameworks and the expansion of financial intermediation services such as credit supply to the informal sectors.

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Our paper explores how the ability to work remotely has changed over time, its relationship with demographic characteristics and employment outcomes, and the role it played during the pandemic recession. We focus on two different remote work indexes, a measure of “no physical presence”—proposed by Dingel and Neiman (2020)—and a measure of “remote communications”—presented by Montenovo et al. (2020). While the two measures suggest a similar prevalence of remote work in recent years and display fairly similar behaviors across demographic groups and in terms of wage and employment outcomes, their evolution is significantly different. While the share of occupations that require no physical presence has remained relatively constant since July 2003, the share of those occupations featuring remote communications increased more than 40 percentage points over the same period. Those differing evolutions paint a starkly different picture of the role of remote work during the pandemic: Compared to a counterfactual scenario that keeps the remote classification constant at the 2004 levels for each measure, the index of no physical presence suggests that there would have been little changes in terms of aggregate hours losses during the pandemic, while the index of remote communications points to much larger declines in aggregate hours. Even without much change in the ability of working remotely, the trend towards more remote work underscores the importance of the hours margin as an additional dimension for the realization of gains from working at home.

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The COVID-19 pandemic had a variety of effects on the healthcare system, including the interruption of regular cardiology practices. We examined the pandemic’s effects on cardiovascular medical device failure by investigating trends in the number of reports of adverse events of several cardiovascular medical devices over the span of three years, including the first year of the pandemic. Specifically, we used data from the FDA’s MAUDE database, calculating the five-week moving average of adverse events associated with both implantable cardioverter defibrillators and coronary drug-eluting stents. We previously reported a 46% decrease in reported deaths attributed to ICDs and a 27% decrease in reported injuries attributed to coronary DES. We use a five-week moving average and confirm a 46% decrease in reported deaths attributed to ICDs, report a 9.8% increase in ICD-attributed malfunctions, and confirm a 27% decrease in reported injuries attributed to coronary DES. The different effects of the pandemic on these adverse event report trends, even within one device, show there are more factors to consider than explanations such as underreporting which would be expected to affect most medical devices relatively homogeneously.