Thursday, April 2, 2026 16:00 - 17:00

This event is both online and in person.

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Online participants are welcome to join us via Zoom:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_cepwell) to receive event updates and the Zoom link to the seminar.

About this event

This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children?s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills?potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

Online participants are welcome to join us via Zoom:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_cepwell) to receive event updates and the Zoom link to the seminar.

The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.

This series is part of the CEP's Community Wellbeing programme.