Smartphone Bans, Student Outcomes and Mental Health

Abstract

How smartphone usage affects well-being and learning among children and adolescents is a concern for schools, parents, and policymakers. Combining detailed administrative data with survey data on middle schools’ smartphone policies, together with an event-study design, I show that banning smartphones significantly decreases the health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls. Post-ban bullying among both genders decreases. Additionally, girls’ GPA improves, and their likelihood of attending an academic high school track increases. These effects are larger for girls from low socio-economic backgrounds. Hence, banning smartphones from school could be a low-cost policy tool to improve student outcomes.

Note:

Funding Information: This work was partly funded by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project No. 262700 and project No. 275800.

Conflict of Interests: The author have no competing interests.

Keywords: Smartphones, mental health, grade point average, bullying, test scores

JEL Classification: I12, I21, I31, J24, O33