An extensive literature in medicine investigates the health consequences of early childhood television watching …. However, this literature does not address the issue of reverse causation, i.e., does early childhood television watching cause … specific health outcomes or do children more likely to have these health outcomes watch more television? This paper uses a …

We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of … preschool television exposure on standardized test scores later in life. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an … additional year of preschool television exposure raises average test scores by about .02 standard deviations. We are able to …