During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–19 flu pandemic to assess the long-run consequences of closing schools on children. We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children's school attendance in 1920, nor on their educational attainment and adult labor market outcomes in 1940. We highlight important differences between the 1918–19 and Covid-19 pandemics and caution against extrapolating from our null effects to modern-day settings.

We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: county-level measures of mobility declined 6-7% within two days of when the stayat-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: small businesses and large retail chains. Third, we estimate fairly uniform responses to stay-at-home orders across the country; effects do not vary by county-level income, political leanings, or urban/rural status.