Does reading affect children’s academic performance? Drawing on Scholarly Culture Theory, I hypothesize that children’s reading outside of school fosters skills that enhance their academic performance. The main inferential challenge is that children who read more are likely to have other characteristics that enhance their skills, thereby complicating causal interpretation. To address this challenge, I use cross-time variation in the amount of sunshine that children are exposed to as a natural experiment that affects whether they read, but that I argue has no direct effect on their academic performance. I hypothesize that sunshine affects whether children read or not more in families with more scholarly culture (books and newspaper in the home) and higher socioeconomic status (SES) because these children have the necessary skills, means and motivations to take up reading when the sun shines less. Empirical results based on analyses of time-diary data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics – Child Development Supplement show that (1) children who were exposed to more sunshine were less likely to read and (2) reading has a positive effect on reading, but not math, test scores.

阅读会影响孩子的学习成绩吗？我基于学术文化理论，假设孩子们在校外阅读可以培养提高他们学习成绩的技能。主要的推论挑战是，阅读能力强的孩子可能还有其他特征可以提高他们的技能，从而使因果解释变得复杂。为了应对这一挑战，我使用儿童经历的日照量的跨时变化作为自然实验，该实验会影响他们的阅读能力，但我认为这对他们的学业成绩没有直接影响。我推测，阳光影响儿童是否读或不详细因为他们的孩子具有必要的技能，手段和动力，可以在阳光普照的时候少读书，所以他们在具有较高学术文化的家庭（家里的书和报纸）和较高的社会经济地位（SES）。根据《收入动态小组研究-儿童发展补编》中的时空数据分析得出的经验结果表明：（1）受到更多阳光照射的儿童阅读的可能性较小；（2）阅读对阅读有积极影响，但不是数学，考试成绩。