Author(s):
Mario Fiorini, Economics Discipline Group, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Michael P. Keane, University of Oxford
Date of publication: February 2013
Working paper number: 4
Abstract:
The allocation of children’s time among different activities may be important for their cognitive and non-cognitive development. In our work we exploit time use diaries from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to study the effect of time allocation across a wide range of alternative activities. By doing so we characterize the trade-off between the activities to which a child is exposed. On the one hand, our results suggest that time spent in educational activities, particularly with parents, is the most productive input for cognitive skill development. On the other hand, non-cognitive skills appear insensitive to alternative time allocations. Instead, these skills are greatly affected by the mother’s parenting style.
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