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Author: Bhattacharya, Samrat

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1.	Bhattacharya, Samrat
1.	The Effect of Grade Retention on Child Test Scores Presented: New Orleans, LA, Allied Social Science Association Annual Meetings, January 4-6, 2008. Also: http://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2008/2008_445.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) Annual Meetings Keyword(s): Grade Retention/Repeat Grade; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Propensity Scores; School Progress; Test Scores/Test theory/IRT Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Each year an estimated two million children in the United States repeat a grade. Investing an additional year in the same grade is expected to help a child to acquire the academic skills she lacks. This, in turn, would help her to be successful in higher grades. In spite of its popularity, grade retention remains a highly controversial practice. A majority of researchers find that, for the repeaters, repeating a grade is strongly correlated with the poor performance in mathematics and reading tests. In this paper I examine whether repeating a grade adds value to the academic performance of repeaters as measured by their improvement in mathematics and reading test scores. I focus on retention in grades one to five. I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Child Survey. Using a difference-in-difference propensity score matching estimator I find that repeating a grade does not lead to an improvement in a repeaters' performance in these tests. On contrary, repeating a grade adversely affects their performance in these tests.
	Bibliography Citation Bhattacharya, Samrat. "The Effect of Grade Retention on Child Test Scores." Presented: New Orleans, LA, Allied Social Science Association Annual Meetings, January 4-6, 2008.

2.	Bhattacharya, Samrat
2.	Three Essays on Children's Skill Acquisition and Academic Performance Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2008. Also: http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/Bhattacharya%20Samrat.pdf?acc_num=osu1221754167 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavioral Problems; Cognitive Ability; Educational Attainment; Family Structure; Grade Retention/Repeat Grade; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Propensity Scores; Skill Formation; Test Scores/Test theory/IRT Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. My dissertation consists of three essays on children's skill acquisition and academic achievement. In all the essays, I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the supplemental Child Survey (NLSY-CHILD). In the first essay, I ask whether family structure causally affects the cognitive test scores and behavioral problems of children. I use multiple observations on each child to estimate a first-difference model and net out the effect of child- and parent-specific time-invariant unobservable factors that are correlated with both the test scores and family structure. I find no improvement in mathematics and reading test scores when mother (re)marries. There is also no decrease in these test scores when a child moved from a two biological parent to a single mother household. However, the results for the behavioral problems suggest that there might be some benefit, in terms of lower behavioral problems, of having a father in the household. In the second essay, I analyze whether delaying entry into kindergarten by an academic year helps to improve the academic performance of the delayed entrants. Every year a large number of parents hold their children out of kindergarten for an academic year although they meet the state kindergarten entry cut-offs (popularly known as "red-shirting"). I use a propensity score matching estimation (PSM) technique to estimate the effect of delaying entry into kindergarten for the delayed entrants by comparing test scores of "matched" delayed and non-delayed entrants. I find that delaying entry into kindergarten has a small but statistically significant negative effect on the reading and mathematics test scores of delayed entrants. In the third essay, I ask whether repeating a grade improves the performance of repeaters in mathematics and reading tests. I use a variant of PSM, where PSM is combined with a difference-in-difference estimator, to estimate the effect of repeating a grade for the repeaters. I find that repeating a grade actually lowers the performance on reading and mathematics tests for the repeaters, compared with how they would have performed if they had not repeated a grade.
	Bibliography Citation Bhattacharya, Samrat. Three Essays on Children's Skill Acquisition and Academic Performance. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2008..

3.	Bhattacharya, Samrat Munasib, Abdul
3.	Can Too Much TV Ground You for Life? Television and Child Outcomes Working Paper, Department of Economics and Legal Studies in Business, Oklahoma State University - Stillwater, April 2007 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics and Legal Studies in Business, Oklahoma State University - Stillwater Keyword(s): Academic Development; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Body Mass Index (BMI); Child Health; Child Self-Administered Supplement (CSAS); Computer Use/Internet Access; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Siblings; Television Viewing; Weight Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The number of hours a typical child watches the television is almost double the suggested guideline by American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). A very large number of studies have claimed an adverse effect of television on children and teenagers. In this paper, we use The National Longitudinal Survey (NLS), a rich, nationally representative data set that allows us to observe the inter-temporal variations in television viewing behavior and the child outcome measures. Unlike the previous studies, we account for unobservables at the family and the child level, and find that hours of television viewing does not have any effect on Body Mass Index, or reading and mathematics test scores. Only in case of behavioral problems television does have an adverse effect, but the magnitude is small. Despite the conventional wisdom and the ongoing populist movement towards proactive policies, these findings suggest that an emphasis on policies based on existing studies may be premature.
	Bibliography Citation Bhattacharya, Samrat and Abdul Munasib. "Can Too Much TV Ground You for Life? Television and Child Outcomes." Working Paper, Department of Economics and Legal Studies in Business, Oklahoma State University - Stillwater, April 2007.

4.	Light, Audrey L. Bhattacharya, Samrat
4.	Computer Use and Children's Academic Achievement Presented: Columbus, OH, Ohio State University, Initiative in Population Research, Spring Seminar Series, April 2006 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Initiative in Population Research, Ohio State University Keyword(s): Academic Development; Child Self-Administered Supplement (CSAS); Childhood; Computer Use/Internet Access Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.
	Bibliography Citation Light, Audrey L. and Samrat Bhattacharya. "Computer Use and Children's Academic Achievement." Presented: Columbus, OH, Ohio State University, Initiative in Population Research, Spring Seminar Series, April 2006.

5.	Munasib, Abdul Bhattacharya, Samrat
5.	Is the 'Idiot's Box' Raising Idiocy? Early and Middle Childhood Television Watching and Child Cognitive Outcome Economics of Education Review 29,5 (October 2010): 873-883. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775710000300 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Geographical Variation; Mothers, Behavior; Obesity; Parent Supervision/Monitoring; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Regions; Television Viewing; Variables, Instrumental; Weight There is widespread belief that exposure to television has harmful effects on children's cognitive development. Most studies that point to a negative correlation between hours of television watching and cognitive outcomes, fail to establish causality. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) we study young children between 5 and 10 years of age during late 1990s and early 2000s. We find strong evidence of negative correlations between hours of television watched and cognitive test scores. However, once parent's characteristics and unobserved child characteristics are taken into account these correlations go away. We find that hours of television viewed per se do not have any measurable impact on children's test scores. Our results are robust to different model specifications and instrumental variable estimates. We conclude that despite the conventional wisdom and the ongoing populist movement, proactive policies to reduce children's television exposure are not likely to improve children's cognitive development and academic performance. Copyright of Economics of Education Review is the property of Pergamon Press - An Imprint of Elsevier Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
	Bibliography Citation Munasib, Abdul and Samrat Bhattacharya. "Is the 'Idiot's Box' Raising Idiocy? Early and Middle Childhood Television Watching and Child Cognitive Outcome." Economics of Education Review 29,5 (October 2010): 873-883.

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