IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qed/wpaper/1047.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do Peers Affect Student Achievement In China's Secondary Schools?

Author

Listed:
  • Steven Lehrer

Abstract

Peer effects have figured prominently in debates on school vouchers, desegregation, ability tracking and anti-poverty programs. Compelling evidence of their existence remains scarce for plaguing endogeneity issues such as selection bias and the reflection problem. This paper is among the first to firmly establish the link between peer performance and student achievement, using a unique dataset from China. We find strong evidence that peer effects exist and operate in a positive and nonlinear manner; reducing the variation of peer performance increases achievement; and our semi-parametric estimates clarify the tradeoffs facing policymakers in exploiting positive peers effects to increase future achievement.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven Lehrer, 2005. "Do Peers Affect Student Achievement In China's Secondary Schools?," Working Paper 1047, Economics Department, Queen's University.
    • Handle: RePEc:qed:wpaper:1047
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/qed_wp_1047.pdf
    File Function: First version 2005
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gordon Winston & David Zimmerman, 2004. "Peer Effects in Higher Education," NBER Chapters, in: College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It, pages 395-424, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Sandra E. Black, 1999. "Do Better Schools Matter? Parental Valuation of Elementary Education," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(2), pages 577-599.
    3. Hanushek, Eric A, 1995. "Interpreting Recent Research on Schooling in Developing Countries," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 10(2), pages 227-246, August.
    4. Robinson, Peter M, 1988. "Root- N-Consistent Semiparametric Regression," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(4), pages 931-954, July.
    5. Michael Kremer, 1993. "The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(3), pages 551-575.
    6. Benabou, Roland, 1996. "Heterogeneity, Stratification, and Growth: Macroeconomic Implications of Community Structure and School Finance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(3), pages 584-609, June.
    7. repec:mpr:mprres:4324 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. William A. Brock & Steven N. Durlauf, 2001. "Discrete Choice with Social Interactions," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 68(2), pages 235-260.
    9. Michael Kremer & Dan Levy, 2008. "Peer Effects and Alcohol Use among College Students," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 22(3), pages 189-206, Summer.
    10. Charles F. Manski, 2000. "Economic Analysis of Social Interactions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 115-136, Summer.
    11. Rivkin, Steven G., 2001. "Tiebout sorting, aggregation and the estimation of peer group effects," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 201-209, June.
    12. Alejandro Gaviria & Steven Raphael, 2001. "School-Based Peer Effects And Juvenile Behavior," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 83(2), pages 257-268, May.
    13. Thomas J. Nechyba, 2000. "Mobility, Targeting, and Private-School Vouchers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(1), pages 130-146, March.
    14. Hanushek, Eric A, 1986. "The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 24(3), pages 1141-1177, September.
    15. Glewwe, Paul, 1997. "Estimating the impact of peer group effects on socioeconomic outcomes: Does the distribution of peer group characteristics matter?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 39-43, February.
    16. Charles F. Manski, 1993. "Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 60(3), pages 531-542.
    17. William N. Evans & Wallace E. Oates & Robert M. Schwab & William N. Evans & Wallace E. Oates & Robert M. Schwab, 2004. "Measuring Peer Group Effects: A Study of Teenage Behavior," Chapters, in: Environmental Policy and Fiscal Federalism, chapter 13, pages 232-257, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    18. Bruce Sacerdote, 2001. "Peer Effects with Random Assignment: Results for Dartmouth Roommates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(2), pages 681-704.
    19. Caroline Hoxby, 2000. "Peer Effects in the Classroom: Learning from Gender and Race Variation," NBER Working Papers 7867, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Hanushek, Eric A. & Kain, John F. & Rivkin, Steven G., 2004. "Disruption versus Tiebout improvement: the costs and benefits of switching schools," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(9-10), pages 1721-1746, August.
    21. James Heckman, 1997. "Instrumental Variables: A Study of Implicit Behavioral Assumptions Used in Making Program Evaluations," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 32(3), pages 441-462.
    22. Joshua D. Angrist & Victor Lavy, 1997. "Using Maimonides' Rule to Estimate the Effect of Class Size on Student Achievement," NBER Working Papers 5888, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    23. Epple, Dennis & Romano, Richard E, 1998. "Competition between Private and Public Schools, Vouchers, and Peer-Group Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(1), pages 33-62, March.
    24. Joshua D. Angrist & Victor Lavy, 1999. "Using Maimonides' Rule to Estimate the Effect of Class Size on Scholastic Achievement," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(2), pages 533-575.
    25. Elizabeth M. Caucutt, 2001. "Peer group effects in applied general equilibrium," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 17(1), pages 25-51.
    26. Kremer, Michael R, 1995. "Research on Schooling: What We Know and What We Don't: A Comment," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 10(2), pages 247-254, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kang, Changhui, 2007. "Classroom peer effects and academic achievement: Quasi-randomization evidence from South Korea," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 458-495, May.
    2. Xu Lin, 2010. "Identifying Peer Effects in Student Academic Achievement by Spatial Autoregressive Models with Group Unobservables," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 28(4), pages 825-860, October.
    3. Arcidiacono, Peter & Nicholson, Sean, 2005. "Peer effects in medical school," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(2-3), pages 327-350, February.
    4. Vincent Boucher & Yann Bramoullé & Habiba Djebbari & Bernard Fortin, 2014. "Do Peers Affect Student Achievement? Evidence From Canada Using Group Size Variation," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(1), pages 91-109, January.
    5. Epple, Dennis & Figlio, David & Romano, Richard, 2004. "Competition between private and public schools: testing stratification and pricing predictions," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(7-8), pages 1215-1245, July.
    6. Fertig, Michael, 2003. "Educational Production, Endogenous Peer Group Formation and Class Composition – Evidence from the PISA 2000 Study," IZA Discussion Papers 714, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Adriaan R. Soetevent, 2006. "Empirics of the Identification of Social Interactions; An Evaluation of the Approaches and Their Results," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(2), pages 193-228, April.
    8. Steven N. Durlauf & Yannis M. Ioannides, 2010. "Social Interactions," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 2(1), pages 451-478, September.
    9. Patrick Bayer & Stephen L. Ross, 2006. "Identifying Individual and Group Effects in the Presence of Sorting: A Neighborhood Effects Application," Working papers 2006-13, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics, revised Jan 2009.
    10. Lugo, Maria Ana, 2011. "Heterogenous peer effects, segregation and academic attainment," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5718, The World Bank.
    11. Piero Cipollone & Alfonso Rosolia, 2007. "Social Interactions in High School: Lessons from an Earthquake," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 948-965, June.
    12. Kling, Jeffrey & Liebman, Jeffrey, 2004. "Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects on Youth," Working Paper Series rwp04-034, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    13. ÖZGÜR, Onur & BISIN, Alberto, 2011. "Dynamic Linear Economies with Social Interactions," Cahiers de recherche 04-2011, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
    14. Krauth, Brian V., 2006. "Simulation-based estimation of peer effects," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 243-271, July.
    15. McEwan, Patrick J., 2003. "Peer effects on student achievement: evidence from Chile," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 131-141, April.
    16. Duncan McVicar & Arnold Polanski, 2010. "Estimating Peer Influences in Teenage Substance Use when Friendship Links are Unobserved," Economics Working Papers 10-04, Queen's Management School, Queen's University Belfast.
    17. Xu Lin, 2015. "Utilizing spatial autoregressive models to identify peer effects among adolescents," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 49(3), pages 929-960, November.
    18. Blume,L.E. & Durlauf,S.N., 2005. "Identifying social interactions : a review," Working papers 12, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
    19. Ana Balsa & Carlos Díaz, 2018. "Social interactions in health behaviors and conditions," Documentos de Trabajo/Working Papers 1802, Facultad de Ciencias Empresariales y Economia. Universidad de Montevideo..
    20. Guido W. Imbens & Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, 2009. "Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(1), pages 5-86, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Peer Effects; Ability Grouping; Selection on observables; China; Academic performance; Teacher quality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
    • P36 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Consumer Economics; Health; Education and Training; Welfare, Income, Wealth, and Poverty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qed:wpaper:1047. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Babcock (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/qedquca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.