Dynamic Aspects of Teenage Friendships and Educational Attainment

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IZA Seminar

Place: Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 9, 53113 Bonn

Date: 06.07.2011, 12:00 - 13:30

   

Presentation by 

Eleonora Patacchini (Cornell University)
   

Abstract:

We study peer effects in education. We first develop a network model that predicts a relationship between own education and peers’education as measured by direct links
in the social network. We then test this relationship using the four waves of the AddHealth data, looking at the impact of school friends nominated in the first wave in 1994-1995 on own educational outcome reported in the fourth wave in 2007-2008. We find that there are strong and persistent peer effects in education since a standard deviation increase in peers’education attainment translates into roughly a 10 percent increase of a standard deviation in the individual’s education attainment (roughly 3.5 more months of education). We also find that peer effects are in fact significant only
for adolescents who were friends in grades 10-12 but not for those who were friends in grades 7-9. This might indicate that social norms are important in educational choice
since the individual’s choice of college seems to be in‡uenced by that of friends in the two last years of high school.

   
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