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October 14, 2025
How did the rollout of broadcast television during the mid-twentieth century affect labor supply decisions in the United States?
Shortly after its commercial debut, television began to claim a central position in American leisure time. This transformation was one of the most significant changes in American time use to occur during the twentieth century.
In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors George Fenton and Felix Koenig examined whether this entertainment innovation and its resulting shift in leisure activity affected labor supply decisions. They found that for people already close to retiring, expanded home entertainment options tipped the scale toward leaving work earlier.
Using employment data from Social Security records and TV signal strength across US markets, the researchers exploited variation in the timing of access to television broadcasts as the technology was rolled out across the country during the 1940s and 1950s.
Figure 3 from the authors’ paper shows the impact of an additional TV station on employment over an eight-year window for different age groups.
Panel A plots estimates of the probability of working for individuals over the age of 50. Following the launch of a TV station, employment declined by approximately 0.3 percentage points, with effects growing over subsequent years. Panel B, representing workers under the age of 50, shows almost no employment response to television availability. The point estimates for younger workers are roughly one-third the magnitude of older workers’ effects and statistically indistinguishable from zero. (The vertical bars in both panels represent 95 percent confidence intervals.)
The authors argue that the employment reduction among older workers primarily reflects earlier retirement decisions rather than other forms of exiting the labor force. Overall, they estimate that retirement rates increased by 0.25 percentage points, translating to approximately two months of earlier retirement on average.
The findings lend empirical support to the hypothesis that mid-twentieth-century improvements in entertainment availability contributed to retirement’s transformation from a necessity to a desirable time of leisure.
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