Who benefits from privileged peers? Evidence from siblings in schools

Abstract

By comparing siblings attending the same school at different points in time, we investigate whether the effect of peer quality on long-term labor market outcomes varies with parental background. We find that exposure to better peers-who have higher mean parental education-increases lifetime earnings of disadvantaged students, coming from families with low parental education, but penalizes privileged students from better educated families. These results suggest that desegregation policies that allocate disadvantaged students to schools with better peers produce long-term benefits. We discuss mechanisms and show that human capital accumulation, ordinal rank and network effects contribute to explain our findings. 1 | INTRODUCTION Desegregation policies-including for instance school vouchers, admission lotteries, and transportation subsidiespromote the reassignment of disadvantaged students to higher quality schools, and therefore access to better resources, teachers, and peers. Interactions with school peers of higher quality can affect individual outcomes in several ways, by influencing the development of skills and the attitudes toward education and individual aspirations, or by providing information on alternative opportunities that affect individual choices and actions. In addition, the quality of weak social ties (Granovetter, 1983) may affect labor market entry and careers. The empirical literature has considered various indicators of school peer characteristics, including the percentage of girls and immigrants in the class/grade/school attended by an individual, the average parental background of peers, and average peer ability. Lavy and Schlosser (2011) and Black, Devereux, and Salvanes (2013) found that a higher share of girls affected the learning outcomes of both girls and boys and their choice of college major. Gould, Lavy, and Paserman (2009), Brunello and Rocco (2013), and Ballatore, Fort, and Ichino (2018) found a negative effect of immigrant concentration in schools on natives' educational achievement. Another peer characteristic that has been shown to generate relevant spillover effects is ability (

The Long-Run Spillover Effects of Pollution: How Exposure to Lead Affects Everyone in the Classroom

“…In addition, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public School district has had a school choice program from 2002 so we exclude that district. 19 Bertoni, Brunello, and Cappellari (2020) use this design to study the effects of privileged peers.…”

Should You Meet the Parents? The Impact of Information on Non-Test Score Attributes on School Choice

“…Additionally, the outflow of well-supported pupils worsens the socio-economic composition of local secondary schools. As a result, the efficiency of school allocation may worsen with non-linear peer effects, i.e., if disadvantaged pupils benefit from proximity with well-supported peers without harming the latter's achievement (Carrell et al, 2009;Bertoni et al, 2020a).…”

Does Gender Matter? The Effect of High Performing Peers on Academic Performances

“…The findings of the literature di↵er considerably: certain papers show that low-achieving students are harmed by HP peers, because of the changes in group interaction, while others reports that lower ability students are more a↵ected by higher quality peer exposure, suggesting that ability spillovers could be a potential channel driving these results students (Feld and Zölitz (2017); Cools et al (2019)). For example, Bertoni et al (2020) found that the exposure to better peers increases lifetime earnings of disadvantaged students, coming from families with low parental education, but penalizes privileged students from better educated families. Also Booij et al (2017) found that low ability students are mostly positively a↵ected, while HP students are completely una↵ected by changes in the ability composition of their peers.…”