Poster #132 - When Curfews Save Lives: Private Education, Sleep Deprivation, and Suicide

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

With 23% of middle and high school students considering suicide in 2007 (Korea Youth Risk Behavior Survey), adolescent suicide has long been a critical threat in South Korea, where the 'rat race' culture fosters extreme competition among adolescents for educational attainment, even late into the night. These phenomena contribute to rising healthcare costs and impose significant social welfare and economic burdens by undermining human capital and productivity in the future labor force. While extensive research has explored the positive effects of public and private education on various socioeconomic outcomes, research on how restricting late-night private tutoring sessions impacts mental health outcomes such as suicide—remains limited.

This paper examines an education curfew policy implemented in 2009 in South Korea that mandates private tutoring institutions to close by 10 pm, 11 pm, or 12 am, depending on the province. By exploiting exogenous variation in hours of exposure to a curfew policy, which differentially affects each province for private tutoring institutes that operate outside of formal schooling and grade cohorts for middle and high school students, I analyze the impact of an additional hour of exposure to curfew policy on extreme mental health outcomes, including suicide ideation and attempt utilizing data set from the Korea Youth Risk Behavior Survey (KYRBS) from 2005 to 2019.

Using a two-way fixed effects model, I find that an hour earlier curfew is expected to decrease suicide ideation and attempt by 2.93 and 0.563 percentage points, respectively. Future iterations of this paper will further examine the results from the staggered roll-out difference-in-differences (DiD) method with a non-binary treatment that may increase.

Author

• Jongho Paul Choe, Florida State University
  Presenting Author