Neighbor Effects and Early Track Choices

The choice between vocational and academic education at the end of secondary school has important long-run effects, and is made at an age where peers' influence might be paramount. In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbors' track choices on 9th graders choices at the end of lower secondary education, in Paris. This question is central to understand the extent to which residential segregation can reinforce social segregation across vocational and academic tracks. We rely on neighbors from the preceding cohort in order to bypass the reflection problem, and use within-catchment-area variation in distance between pairs of students to account for residential sorting. We use a pair-wise model that enables us to carefully study the role of distance between neighbors, and to perform detailed heterogeneity analysis. Our results suggest that close neighbors do influence track choices at the end of 9th grade, particularly for pupils pursuing a vocational track. This effect is driven by neighbors living in the same building, and is larger for pairs of boys and for pairs of pupils from low social background. Overall, our results suggest that neighbor effects tend to accentuate social segregation across high school tracks.