The Impact of Banning Mobile Phones in Swedish Secondary Schools

Dany Kessel, Hulda Lif Hardardottir and Björn Tyrefors
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Hulda Lif Hardardottir: Stockholm University

No 1288, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it suggests that the lowest-achieving students have the most to gain. Using a similar empirical setup but with data from Sweden, we partly replicate their study and thereby add external validity to this policy question. Furthermore, we increase the survey response rate of schools to approximately 75 %, although at the expense of the amount of information collected in the survey. In Sweden, we find no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance and can reject even small-sized gains.

Keywords: Mobile phone ban; Student performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2019-06-25, Revised 2020-02-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-law, nep-pay and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of banning mobile phones in Swedish secondary schools (2020)
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