Child leisure activities and skill development.

Autor/in	Kemper, Thorsten
Titel	Child leisure activities and skill development.
Quelle	Köln (2017), V, 110 S.Verfügbarkeit Dissertation, Universität zu Köln, 2017.
Beigaben	Illustrationen
Zusatzinformation	Inhaltsverzeichnis
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; Monographie
Schlagwörter	Empirische Untersuchung; Längsschnittuntersuchung; Panel; Kognitive Entwicklung; Kindheitsforschung; Bildungsökonomie; Bildungsertrag; Eltern; Kind; Aktivität; Lesekompetenz; Mathematische Kompetenz; Musik; Humankapital; Bildungsinvestition; Investition; Arbeitsmarkt; Freizeitgestaltung; Zeitbudget; USA
Abstract	This thesis analyzes if and how the allocation of time during childhood affects development trajectories. It focuses on short-to-medium-run effects of the pursuit of certain activities on cognitive skill formation and on long-run effects that is the successful integration into the labor market. Section 1 collects a variety of recent findings regarding the importance of child skills and its determinants [and] sets up an illustrative model that serves to establish the infamous endogeneity problem that riddles empirical work and to highlight the potential investment nature of leisure activities in an intertemporal version of Becker's theory of time allocation. Chapter 2 tackles three questions: Do activities matter for skill acquisition? If so, which activities do matter? And lastly, how do child activities compare to standard measures of parental investments? In order to find answers, the author analyzes a sample of children from the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) by means of panel data methods. [The] results suggest that activities indeed explain a substantial fraction in the variation of cognitive skill test scores. One potential drawback of the analysis in chapter 2 is that an important covariate may be prone to measurement error due to its nature as an index with a priori weights. Chapter 3 overcomes this by formulating a structural equation model. Supplementing the structural equation of interest, the production function for a respective skill, with a measurement model ensures that weights for different investment variables are endogenously determined and introduces instruments that help mitigate potential bias due to measurement error of the proxy for parental investments. The results support the findings of the previous analysis. Chapter 4 analyzes whether extracurricular child activities not only affect short-to-medium-run performance measures, but whether they also elicit long-run effects regarding educational achievements and success in the labor market. The evidence regarding this relationship is mixed. (Orig.).
Erfasst von	DIPF \| Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation, Frankfurt am Main
Update	2019/2