 Double in Trouble: Boys and Learning in School in Texas, North Carolina, and ItalyAntonio Ciccone (), Federico Cingano and Walter Garcia-Fontes CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Abstract: Children have been found to learn less in school when there are more boys in the classroom. We make two contributions to the literature. First, we revisit the empirical approach based on withinschool grade-level variation. We find that with grade retention (a feature of most school systems) the approach is subject to a selection bias that generates effects of boys on their classmates’ skills in the absence of any peer effects. We propose an alternative based on variation across enrollment cohorts. Second, we implement both approaches using data on around 3.6 million children in 14,000 primary schools in Texas, North Carolina, and Italy. We find adverse effects of boys on how much children learn in school using both the grade-level and the enrollment-cohort approach. The enrollment-cohort approach yields adverse effects on boys that are at least double the adverse effects on girls in all three school systems. By contrast, consistent with the selection bias we highlight, the grade-level approach yields similar adverse effects on boys and girls in the school systems with substantial grade retention. Keywords: Peer effects in school; grade retention; selection bias (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2025_667 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany. |
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