Paper by Panle Jia Barwick, Siyu Chen, Chao Fu & Teng Li: “Concerns over the excessive use of mobile phones, especially among youths and young adults, are growing. Leveraging administrative student data from a Chinese university merged with mobile phone records, random roommate assignments, and a policy shock that affects peers’ peers, we present, to our knowledge, the first estimates of both behavioral spillover and contextual peer effects, and the first estimates of medium-term impacts of mobile app usage on academic achievement, physical health, and labor market outcomes. App usage is contagious: a one s.d. increase in roommates’ in-college app usage raises own app usage by 4.4% on average, with substantial heterogeneity across students. App usage is detrimental to both academic performance and labor market outcomes. A one s.d. increase in own app usage reduces GPAs by 36.2% of a within-cohort-major s.d. and lowers wages by 2.3%. Roommates’ app usage exerts both direct effects (e.g., noise and disruptions) and indirect effects (via behavioral spillovers) on GPA and wage, resulting in a total negative impact of over half the size of the own usage effect. Extending China’s minors’ game restriction policy of 3 hours per week to college students would boost their initial wages by 0.7%. Using high-frequency GPS data, we identify one underlying mechanism: high app usage crowds out time in study halls and increases absences from and late arrivals at lectures…(More)”.
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