DP19579 Digital Distractions with Peer Influence: The Impact of Mobile App Usage on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes
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.
