Close Neighbours Matter: Neighbourhood Effects on Early Performance at School

Abstract

Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. There is an identification problem because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods measured in available data are often considerably larger than those which matter for outcomes (i.e. close neighbours). Several institutional features of France enable us to address these problems. We find that an adolescent's outcomes at the end of junior high-school are strongly influenced by the performance of other adolescents in the neighbourhood

Estimating peer effects in Swedish high school using school, teacher, and student fixed effects

“…There is evidence that students born early in the year perform on average better than students born later. Thus, variation in birth month composition of peers within neighborhoods and across time is used in Goux and Maurin (2006).…”

The Social Geography of Education: Neighborhood, Class Composition, and the Educational Achievement of Elementary School Students in Zurich, Switzerland

“…Using three alternative identification strategies, Gibbons (2002) demonstrates how children with an economically disadvantaged background benefit from higher proportions of accumulated human capital in the neighborhood. Goux & Maurin (2007) used the clustered structure of the data to construct small-scale neighborhoods (i. e., the people in the direct vicinity of one's dwelling). They found significant and, in comparison to other studies, very strong effects on the probability of grade retention.…”

Dynamics of social trust and human capital in the learning process: The case of the Japan garment cluster in the period 1968–2005

“…There has recently been growing interest in such leaning mechanisms from the empirical point of view, and hence a growing number of studies have attempted to explore the developmental process based upon this learning model (Munshi 2004;Foster and Rosenzweig 1995;Goux and Maurin 2007;Yamauchi 2004 ) 1 . On the other hand, school education, which generates human capital, has also convincingly been argued as an important factor of economic development (Yamamura et al 2003).…”