The long-term effect of childhood exposure to technology using surrogates

TL;DR

This study investigates how childhood exposure to technology influences adult income and social mobility, using Danish data and surrogate index methodology to link early tech exposure to long-term economic outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel surrogate index approach to estimate long-term effects of childhood technology exposure on adult income using detailed occupational data.

Findings

A one standard error increase in childhood tech exposure raises income rank by 2 percentage points.

Childhood exposure to computers has a significant positive impact on adult social mobility.

Policy implications suggest updating educational curricula to include more computer exposure for children.

Abstract

We study how childhood exposure to technology at ages 5-15 via the occupation of the parents affects the ability to climb the social ladder in terms of income at ages 45-49 using the Danish micro data from years 1961-2019. Our measure of technology exposure covers the degree to which using computers (hardware and software) is required to perform an occupation, and it is created by merging occupational codes with detailed data from O*NET. The challenge in estimating this effect is that long-term outcome is observed over a different time horizon than our treatment of interest. We therefore adapt the surrogate index methodology, linking the effect of our childhood treatment on intermediate surrogates, such as income and education at ages 25-29, to the effect on adulthood income. We estimate that a one standard error increase in exposure to technology increases the income rank by 2\%-points, which is economically and statistically significant and robust to cluster-correlation within families. The derived policy recommendation is to update the educational curriculum to expose children to computers to a higher degree, which may then act as a social leveler.