Time to Work or Time to Play: The Effect of Student Employment on Homework, Housework, Screen Time, and Sleep

Abstract

Although student employment may have some positive effects on students’ future earnings by providing work experience, some researchers have documented a small negative relationship between working while in high school and a student’s academic achievement. For example, Ruhm (1995, 1997) and Tyler (2003) found that student employment has a negative effect on both the number of years of schooling that students complete and their 12th grade math achievement. Oettinger (1999) found a decline in the grades of minority students who work long hours. Using U.K. data, Dustmann and Van Soest (2007) found that part-time work has a small negative effect on males’ exam performance. However, less emphasis has been placed on the mechanisms through which these effects occur. One hypothesis is that working students get less sleep. Oettinger (1999) suggested that students’ grades may suffer if they are fatigued from working long hours. Another hypothesis is that high school students who work do less homework, as found by Kalenkoski and Pabilonia (2009a). The latter may be particularly important given that Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2004) found a strong positive relationship between first-year college students’ study time and their grade point averages and Betts (1997) found that high school students who were assigned more homework had higher math scores. This paper uses data on high school students aged 15-18 from the 2003-2007 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) to examine the effects of doing paid work on students’ major activities. Because class time is mandatory for enrolled students and because very little variation in such time is observed, we focus on activities outside of the classroom. In particular, we explore the effects of market work on the time students spend doing homework and sleeping (as time spent in these activities may affect their academic achievement), the time they spend doing household work (including care for younger siblings), and the time they spend using the