Middle-achieving students are also my peers: The impact of peer effort on academic performance

This paper provides evidence of a new peer effect structure by showing that middle-achieving peers influence academic achievement. By exploiting the random assignment of students to classes within middle schools, we find that students perform better in the presence of hardworking middle-achieving peers. We examine the role of a better classroom environment, motivated learning attitudes, and responsible teachers as key mechanisms. Low- (vs. high-) achieving students are more strongly affected in terms of academic performance and learning attitude by middle-achieving peers’ positive spillovers. Therefore, teachers should give due consideration to middle-achieving students.