IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecoedu/v98y2024ics0272775723001504.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Are children spending too much time on enrichment activities?

Author

Listed:
  • Caetano, Carolina
  • Caetano, Gregorio
  • Nielsen, Eric

Abstract

We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and extracurricular lessons on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We take into consideration the opportunity cost of spending time on enrichment, as it may replace activities such as sleep and socializing. Our study controls for selection on unobservables using a control function approach that leverages the fact that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, giving us direct information about the effect of confounders on skills. Using time diary data available in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that the net effect of the last hour of enrichment is close to zero for cognitive skills and negative for non-cognitive skills. The negative effects for non-cognitive skills are concentrated in high school, consistent with elevated academic pressure related to college admissions.

Suggested Citation

  • Caetano, Carolina & Caetano, Gregorio & Nielsen, Eric, 2024. "Are children spending too much time on enrichment activities?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:98:y:2024:i:c:s0272775723001504
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102503
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775723001504
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102503?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Enrichment; Cognitive; Non-cognitive; Bunching; Homework;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General
    • C24 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Truncated and Censored Models; Switching Regression Models; Threshold Regression Models

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:98:y:2024:i:c:s0272775723001504. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/econedurev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.