Social Econ Blog

Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro (two graduates of the College who were also in the Ph.D. program with me) have a new paper out indicating, at least in the early days of TV, watching TV in pre-school didn't negatively effect child achievement. Their identification strategy (i.e., how they create a convincing estimate of the causal effect of TV) is quite clever and is a good example of how good economists (like Gentzkow and Shapiro) think about empirical problems. I recommend checking it out. The abstract:

We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores later in life. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average test scores by about .02 standard deviations. We are able to reject negative effects larger than about .03 standard deviations per year of television exposure. For reading and general knowledge scores, the positive effects we find are marginally statistically significant, and these effects are largest for children from households where English is not the primary language, for children whose mothers have less than a high school education, and for non-white children. To capture more general effects on human capital, we also study the effect of childhood television exposure on school completion and subsequent labor market earnings, and again find no evidence of a negative effect.

Meanwhile, another study indicates that playing video games may delay brain aging.