CASE Social Exclusion Seminar: Gregory Veramendi

This is a HYBRID event, with an option to join the seminar in-person at the LSE, or virtually. The speaker will present in-person.

I provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effect of delaying children’s smartphone ownership through a community-led policy. Since 2024, the Smartphone Free Childhood movement has coordinated UK families through a “Parent Pact” to delay a child’s first smartphone until age 14. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, I compare changes in children’s mental-health needs across English schools. Treated schools are those where at least one fifth of families signed the pact. Control schools are similar schools where fewer than 5 percent signed. I find that mental-health special needs measured by schools fall by about 8 percent relative to control schools. Similarly, mental-health disability needs independently measured by the Department for Work and Pensions fall by about 6 percent relative to similar communities. The effects are driven by younger children, who are less likely to already own a phone. I also find that by the second year, pupils’ illness absence and teacher turnover decline by 7 and 12 percent, respectively. The findings support coordinated ownership delay as a near-zero-cost complement to school phone bans and statutory age limits. They also give parents causal evidence for delaying a child’s first smartphone through the primary-school years.

Gregory Veramendi is an Associate Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He studies how education, skills, and family decisions shape earnings, health, and gender inequality over the life cycle. Recent work examines children's mental health, the career costs of fertility, and the gender wage gap. The research combines structural models with reduced-form methods to estimate causal effects. Veramendi is also a Research Associate at the Swedish Institute for Social Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and a Research Affiliate at CESifo. Veramendi serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics and the Journal of Human Capital. Before economics, Veramendi spent ten years in experimental particle physics at the Collider Detector at Fermilab.