Professors, alumna publish research in Applied Economic Letters

Steve DeLoach, professor of economics, Jennifer Platania, associate professor of economics and Stephanie Franz ’11 published an article titled “Reconsidering the effect of work intensity on study time” in volume 21, issue 5 of Applied Economic Letters.

DeLoach, Platania and Franz used data from the American Time Use Survey to study the effects of part-time work on high school students’ overall study time. Their findings indicate that negative effects may have been previously underestimated for students’ academic performance.

The research began as Franz’s SURE project she completed as an Honors Fellow under the mentorship of DeLoach during her time at Elon.

The abstract reads:

“Recent evidence on the impact of youth employment on study time has found only small, negative effects. However, previous estimates may be biased downward due to weak identification and measurement error. In this article, we re-examine the question with more recent data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–11) using a number of alternate estimation techniques. Results show that using a longer time span, state unemployment rates appears to be a stronger instrument for part-time work than was previously found. Depending on the estimation method used, the negative effects of part-time work on study time may be considerably larger than previously thought.”