Does time spent playing video games crowd out time spent studying?

Abstract

As new ICT technologies are developed and adopted, they will be increasingly incorporated into our lifestyles and displacing other activities. Video games, in particular, have greatly risen in popularity and can consume a great deal of time in gamers' lives. I examine the effect of video game time use on the likely activities that it displaces using week-to-week variation in video game popularity to identify causal effects of game quality from selection into gaming. The results indicate that each hour of increased video gaming displaces 26 minutes of human capital accumulating activities.