Does education affect leisure-time reading? Evidence from time use survey

ABSTRACT

Utilizing the data from Turkish Time Use Survey and exploiting Turkish compulsory schooling reform as a source of exogenous variation in education, this paper shows that education reduces employed men’s leisure-time reading. For women, on the other hand, we do not find any causal impact of increased education on time spent in reading. We conclude that education may affect men’s reading habits by altering preferences towards other leisure activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• compulsory schooling reform
• Leisure-Time reading
• time use

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D01
• J22
• I21

Acknowledgement

Author would like to thank Cagla Okten, Halit Akar, and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. Author is also thankful to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) for granting permission to use Time Use Survey Micro Data Set, 2014–2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Estimating the model by including the birth cohort, 1986, does not change our findings.

² Consistent with our main results, education has a negative but marginally significant impact on time spent in all reading activities on weekdays, which is named academic/job-related reading in this paper.

³ Our OLS results are consistent with the existing literature, for instance, with Aguiar and Hurst (2009).

⁴ For employed females, we also estimate the optimal bandwidth by using the STATA command rdrobust for the outcome variable, leisure-time reading. We find that the optimal bandwidth for employed females is seven years before and after the cut off birth year, 1986.

⁵ Detailed results are available upon request.