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Foreign-born Peers and Academic Performance

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  • Dylan Conger

Abstract

The academic performance of foreign-born youth in the United States is well studied, yet little is known about whether and how foreign-born students influence their classmates. In this article, I develop a set of expectations regarding the potential consequences of immigrant integration across schools, with a distinction between the effects of sharing schools with immigrants who are designated as English language learners (ELL) and those who are not. I then use administrative data on multiple cohorts of Florida public high school students to estimate the effect of immigrant shares on immigrant and native-born students’ academic performance. The identification strategy pays careful attention to the selection problem by estimating the effect of foreign-born peers from deviations in the share foreign-born across cohorts of students attending the same school in different years. The assumption underlying this approach is that students choose schools based on the composition of the entire school, not on the composition of each entering cohort. The results of the analysis, which hold under several robustness checks, indicate that foreign-born peers (both those who are ELL and those who are non-ELL) have no effect on their high school classmates’ academic performance. Copyright Population Association of America 2015

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  • Dylan Conger, 2015. "Foreign-born Peers and Academic Performance," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 52(2), pages 569-592, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:demogr:v:52:y:2015:i:2:p:569-592
    DOI: 10.1007/s13524-015-0369-2
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    Cited by:

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    2. Jason Fletcher & Jinho Kim & Jenna Nobles & Stephen Ross & Irina Shaorshadze, 2021. "The Effects of Foreign-Born Peers in US High Schools and Middle Schools," Journal of Human Capital, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(3), pages 432-468.
    3. Fletcher, Jason M. & Ross, Stephen L. & Zhang, Yuxiu, 2020. "The consequences of friendships: Evidence on the effect of social relationships in school on academic achievement," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    4. Contreras, Dante & Gallardo, Sebastián, 2022. "The effects of mass migration on the academic performance of native students. Evidence from Chile," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    5. Kelvin K. C. Seah, 2021. "Impact of Immigrant Peers on Native Students’ Achievement: Evidence from Australia, Canada and the United States," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 54(1), pages 94-116, March.
    6. Fedeli, Emanuele & Triventi, Moris, 2022. "Immigrant concentration and ethno-linguistic diversity in the classroom: consequences for children’s well-being, social integration and academic competencies," SocArXiv uk73m, Center for Open Science.
    7. Timothy M. Diette & Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere, 2017. "Do limited English students jeopardize the education of other students? Lessons from the North Carolina public school system," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(5), pages 446-461, September.
    8. Morales, Camila, 2022. "Do refugee students affect the academic achievement of peers? Evidence from a large urban school district," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).

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